Fast Blood Delivery
by LidoDeck
Summary: Garrus spent two years in a self-destructive freefall. Shepard died. Left with too many deep scars, Garrus and Shepard attempt to reconcile what's happened to them with the oncoming reapers, with themselves, and with each other.
1. Heart Zero Beating

Omega was not a pleasant place.

It was too big. It was too small. It was dirty and treacherous and poorly maintained, and that was just the people. Mechanically-speaking, it was even worse off. It creaked and groaned, it blinked and sparked. It was falling apart, it was a nightmare. It was too far away from civilization. It was certainly much too close to it.

A piece of trash city on a burnt out rock in a forsaken nebula at the end of space. An ugly metal spindle on a rust-coloured rock, far away from any homeworld planets or even optimistically settled ones, Omega was ignored, abandoned, and quite happy with it. It was a seething, turgid mass of chaos, cruelty, blackmail and extortion. It was the unofficial homeworld of every criminal and con artist in the universe. Omega was where decency came to die.

* * *

The chilly, greasy air of Omega breathed gently through the open windows of the once-abandoned building, bearing with it a ubiquitous scent of garbage, and the distant din of an insomniac metropolis in a moon-sized space-bottle—the sounds and scents of a crowded city that hadn't seen prosperity for years, and even then only the prosperity of the murderous and criminal.

The building was empty. Or, more accurately, it had been empty recently. It had been occupied before less recently, but all the furnishings bore the signs of hurried absence. Things had been left out, cupboards had been rifled through, and everyone had left. Then someone had come back. Just one person.

He was here now, upstairs from the main floor, in what had once been a living space. He was engaged in pitched combat with a large group of people, outside the building—exchanging gunfire back and forth through the window—and he was face to face with death in every way it was possible for a person to be so.

* * *

Garrus pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession. His rifle did not suffer from especially unmanageable recoil, and he used it to his advantage. The three figures dashing up the bridge toward him were arranged roughly in a sort of ragged, lolloping single file; the rifle pulled up a little with each shot he took, sighting further back along the line, and it only required the slightest nudge left or right to take the three down.

Straight through the head each time. Except for the last one, a salarian. The bolt sank into his neck.

The young salarian sank to his knees, eyes bugging in agonized dismay. He couldn't have been very old; he was still wearing the camouflage mottling that lingered on young salarians' skins.

Panic ripped the salarian's facial features apart, contorting them into a horrified, nightmare display as his blood most likely poured down the inside of his own throat, drowning him and bleeding him out in the same fatal stroke.

That should've been a clean shot. Garrus blinked, once. He was getting sloppy.

He frowned in something that might have been vague disappointment and ejected the thermal clip. It dropped to the ground, hissing and smoking, and gently began to char away the dust around it. It glowed a faint, cheerful red. Garrus stared at it, blankly.

It _should_ have been a clean shot. He was getting sloppy to let—to le…

The memory of the horrified, hopeless expression on the face of the dying kid drifted behind his eyes for a moment.

He brought his hand back and tapped his fingertips meditatively on the side of his helmet. _No._ It should have been a clean shot.

He reached for another thermal clip, and slid it into the base of his gun. The gun made a faint electric sizzle as charge began to build up along the barrel again, preparing the next microscopic shaving of metal for its super-sonic trip into somebody's face.

There was a part of him that might have been bothered or upset about the pain he caused the salarian, up until recently, but Garrus had stopped feeling bad about things over the past few weeks. He had slowly found it more and more difficult to care about people; chilling and inhumane accidents like this became mild vexations, and the mowing down of person after person had stopped registering as anything except the rhythm of a light tattoo, keeping count in the back of his head.

He was too tired to worry about this, though. He was too tired to spend much time feeling anything, so he ignored these little problems when they came and, very soon after, they inevitably left again, leaving him with the blissful, clear-thinking head of one who is completely detached from the situation and from everything one is doing.

It was the peculiar clear-headedness that came from killing. In times of intense stress and high combat, Garrus had learned to take advantage of this ability to switch off his feelings. He had learned the skill a couple of years ago, and it had served him remarkably well. There was a price to pay, later, of course—for this stifling of your emotions—as your mind surfed high above all the thoughts and feelings that you did not, would not dare acknowledget—here was always a price to pay, later, but for now...

Well, he was going to pay his price soon enough; Garrus was going to die. He was boxed into a little hole, the victim of exhaustion, undersupply, and a constant, constant stream of attacks. One of these days, he knew, his body would fall asleep on him, whether he wanted it to or not. Then it would be over.

He saw another couple of straggly thugs toting their terrible, hocked firearms up the bridge. He squeezed the trigger twice, as his scope glided across their visage and then past. They fell, cleanly this time.

_I can't flatter myself, though; it's not that hard.  
_

They had no concept of advancing through cover, no idea of how to make use of their shield, how to make use of their silhouette, their environment, the light, the wind, the buildings around them. The fact that he was picking them off so easily was not a testament to his skill, it was a testament to the desperation of the hideous coalition that his arrival had caused.

They were a bunch of idiots out there, but what could you expect from bounty hires. Eclipse had long since stopped sending their own troops in, Blue Suns were the next to stop, after exhausting all their options, trying all points of entry, and sending a—

Garrus smiled faintly, but not happily—sending a gunship. It was almost a little depressing how fast he had taken it out. People inexperienced with using the Mantis gunship for anything except civilian enforcement always left the Mantis' nose riding up in the air, exposing what veterans called its 'glass jaw', to coin a human phrase. It was a 8-inch gap in the armour, inset against the back of where its nose-cone where a variety of data ports were left under a simple latch cover.

Normally you couldn't see it, but every once in a while, a rookie would back-pedal too fast—to slow down, or to counter a strong gust of wind—and the little crevasse would swing into sight long enough for someone with a steady hand to get off _one perfect shot._

The thing had been blinded and disarmed in an instant. None of the weapons could sight, the EAL system had probably been cored out, and reduced to a collection of extremely expensive and absolutely useless sensors which were no longer connected to anything. The gunship listed badly as the pilot, forced to fly the gunship completely manually, desperately fought to get control of the drifting, useless craft.

Garrus sniffed, his nostrils flaring and contracting to break the dust caked on his face; his helmet's air filter had stopped being useful days ago. He could see a new group of useless day-wage bandits, shuffling and jostling awkwardly beyond the bridge as they eyed the piles of bodies on the bridge.

He considered taking a shot at one of them, but they were partly obscured by a palette of useless junk—hurriedly formed into a barricade. They would start across soon enough.

He sniffed again, and almost sneezed. He frowned, and scrunched his face up, to shift the sensation. He was getting dry. He picked up his canteen, it was discouragingly light and made only a faint splashing as it moved. He put it down again.

Across the bridge, the recruited guns decided to make a run for it, and headed out in much the same fashion that the last few dozen had done. They were trying to... buy time, for something.

For what?

He'd find out soon. He could probably guess. There were too many doors into this place. Wonderful when you wanted to exit and enter unseen, but secrecy was no longer a part of defence, and at this stage every entrance was just another unguarded way in. He'd done his best to block them off, but he had been here a long time, and the mercenaries had probably started digging at around the same time they'd given up trying to take the building by storm.

He lazily began shooting down the bridge again. The gunmen panicked, rushing for cover. A couple of them made it behind a stack of crates. The rest, well—

The rest didn't.

He watched the badly-armoured heads bobbing and ducking over the top of the crate stack. They had no concept of their position in physical space. Anyone worth their armour had to have known that Garrus could see them from his angle up above.

One of them, a human, peered above the edge of the crates and brought his gun up, wildly searching across the top row of windows for a sign of the terrifying rogue turian they had been sent to kill.

Garrus sighted, rested his finger on the trigger.

There was a flash from the edge of the bridge. The man twitched and jerked, and slumped down against the box, out of sight. The other gunman behind the boxes jumped up, startled, and received a blazing line of light machine-gun fire to the face. His brain shredded to pieces, he took a single tottering, mindless step backwards, and pitched over the edge of the bridge.

Garrus stared, blankly. He had not fired at either of them.

This was not something he had prepared for.

For the first time in a day and a half, Garrus moved with alacrity, departing the dreamy ghost-walk state he had fallen into. He sat up, shook his head vigorously, hunched down, and sighted down at the scene again.

Yes, they were dead. Someone from the other side of the bridge had shot them. Alarm bells began to go off in the turian's head. Were the mercenaries done stalling—he tried to assess the situation—was that their way of clearing the field for a final approach? Should he turn his attention to the stairs behind him?

He began mentally cataloguing the things left in the building. Thermal clips downstairs? A couple, probably. Cooler of water, half empty. A package of explosives, contact spray, caps; useless in a firefight, obviously. Guns? Useless to him, he wouldn't want to offer the inbound mercenaries any advantage in spare firearms, though, if it came to—

Three people approached along the bridge.

They knew what they were doing. He could tell, instantly, without having to look down his scope. Two aliens flanking a third perfectly, lagging a little, separating their movements from each other, bobbing and weaving in turn to keep him, the on-looking sniper, off guard. They were exposed on the bridge for only a second before they'd all reached cover, and he'd lost sight of them.

A few more people entered the far end of the bridge. Garrus watched in mild curiosity. They were trying a full-on assault again?

_That's... interesting._

He wondered if these were special combatants, specialists that the rest of the mercenaries had been waiting to arrive from off-world. That would've been flattering—he'd been so much trouble that they'd sent for more outside help to finish him off.

He placed his eye against the scope, reflecting impassively on whether these three would get any closer to the front door than the rest had, when a firefight broke out amongst the group on the other side of the bridge.

Then Garrus' world began to slide.

Gunfire flashed back and forth, shields buzzed and hummed. The two groups—the first three versus, well, everyone else, apparently—were actively shooting at each other. The professionalism of the mysteriously well-organized trio on the other end of the bridge was further established. They split up their targets perfectly, delivering as little ammunition as possible to deliver death to the intended recipient.

Garrus began to actively wonder, for the first time in days, at the situation. He knew that the Blood Pack and Eclipse did not get along well at the best of times, but were they really infighting? It didn't make sense. The three he saw appear on the bridge didn't look like Eclipse or Blood pack—couldn't have been Blue Suns—wrong colour, wrong silhouette. His stomach began to turn, and his breath began to speed up as his mind flared alive, trying to make sense of the situation. His world tilted further, as the situation became more surreal.

His rifle's scope went white. Garrus looked up, away from the scope; fire had broken out on the bridge—a roiling, churning inferno that lit up nearly two-thirds of the opposing, decidedly less professional members of the firefight. His rifle's scope chirped a warning, auto-cycling down its range of exposures and filters in an attempt to find some setting at which it could focus.

Garrus ignored the warning and switched all the filters off except the polarized screen. He ignored the bleeding white stains left on the periphery of the scope by potentially damaging over-exposure, instead focusing on getting a bead on his next set of adversaries. If they were smart they would know he would have trouble seeing them, and would choose now to advance their cover.

If they were very smart, they would know that he knew that, and would stay put.

A pair of hands stuck up from behind the cover that the Trio had hidden. The leader's hands, the one who had taken point. The hands were empty of weapons, and were waving at him.

They were very smart. _And... friendly?_ His pulse increased, the nervous turning in Garrus' stomach began an agitated, turgid churn of panicked hope mixed with disbelief. Someone was coming to bail him out. His world was leaning dangerously now, disorienting and unreal.

After a few moments—still separated from the head of the bridge—the leader stepped out, hands still in the air.

Finally acquiescing, in the face of his scope's frantic warning, Garrus applied a couple of filters, trying not to black out the face of the distant figure by low exposure. He zoomed in, and tried to get a better look at the leader who had stepped out in front of him.

And his world capsized.

_Shepard._

Garrus's mind went blank, filling with white-hot noise like the sizzling, screeching crackle of a jammed radio—the antagonistic, agonized squealing of a comm channel in a solar flare.

He stared down the sight, fixedly.

_I'm dead_, Garrus thought.

No he wasn't. That was ridiculous.

_I have to be._

No.

Why.

It couldn't be Shepard, Garrus thought. He had lost it. He was dreaming. It felt like he was dreaming.

The world swam and shifted awkwardly in front of his eyes. Shock rippled through his system, making every inch of his body feel hot, and then icy, icy cold. His tongue felt clammy, and the back of his throat seized. He felt sick.

No he didn't.

Yes he did.

No.

The ghost on the other end of his rifle sight ducked, suddenly. A bolt flew through the air, narrowly avoided the apparition's shoulder, and she—it—Shepard—_the ghost_—dodged behind cover again; dodged onto _his side of the bridge_. Garrus's mind stopped its frantic whirling, and the turian focused. Whoever the leader was, she, or he, had placed their trust in him explicitly by taking cover on his side of the crates, fulling exposing her or himself to Garrus's gun. He had a duty to protect them, at least until he could figure out what they were doing.

What were they doing—could they be trying to lure him into letting someone across the bridge? Could this be a bluff?

No, these were mercenaries, they solved their problems with bullets—even Eclipse wasn't that subtle.

The spectral form of Shepard beckoned to her teammates, they quickly traded their side of the cover for Garrus's. He looked at them sharply, but didn't recognize them. A salarian, and—a krogan. Wrex?

No. Not Wrex. He didn't recognize the salarian, either. He turned his rifle back to settle his scope on the leader, the person who might or might not have been Shepard. Maybe he had just been hallucinating. He had been awake for three days—he might've just thought he'd seen Shepard, through a haze of exhaustion and stress and wishful thinking, and wh—

His scope found the leader again, and, again, Shepard stood in his sights, shooting over the cover at the far end of the bridge where the fire had subsided and more panicking hired guns were trying to figure out who was on their side.

It still looked like Shepard.

He moved his gunsight up, mechanically, and landed two shots home on the people at the far end of the bridge. He returned the sight to Shepard.

She was wearing—not N7 armour. He was not hallucinating some ghost from two years ago. She was wearing a top-heavy hodgepodge of—what he recognized—were capacitor-lined armour plates combined with custom-tooled, obvious even at this range, ceramic plating, and an off-sided shoulder guard. She was not wearing a helmet.

She'd always worn a helmet.

She wasn't wearing one now. Her head was bared. She turned momentarily, to shield her face from a blast, and he saw a glimmer of blue. She was wearing a headpiece.

He stared. It was Kuwashii Visor. He instinctively touched the side of his helmet, where—underneath the armour—adjunct to his vision for years, the same visor ticked out a constant readout of information.

His mind numbly rattled off specifications: _eta-grade, version 5, full forward, wide-bar support—good for turians and humans, keeps the sensor suite out of the peripheral vision—capable of tracking wide-band emissions on a scale of what am I doing, what am I __doing__, __**what am I doing?**_

Shepard looked up at the window he had shot from, and nodded to him. One respectful nod. She was always like that in battle. She was so:

well-mannered. So well-mannered it was almost impossible to mistake her battle attitude for anyone else's. She was storming up the length of the bridge now, weaving around cover quickly as her two squad-mates covered her movement.

Her movement. No other human female walked like her. She had a strange, broad-strided swagger, almost like a turian—or a male of her species—keeping her centre of gravity low, moving rigidly from the hips.

It had to be Shepard. It had to be. Garrus's mind whirled, abuzz with blazing, racing thoughts—the first thoughts he'd had in days—too many thoughts. He shoved them away, replacing them again with combat instinct: here came the next wave of hired dreck.

He watched carefully as a new group of hire-by-days and armed hobos milled around awkwardly at the edge of the bridge. One of them pointed at Shepard. Two others raised their rifles.

On a whim, Garrus took a shot at Shepard. The bolt bounced off her shield, which vanished. She jerked, stumbled. For a moment she gazed up at the window in shock, then she appeared to buckle down to the task at hand. The group at the end of the bridge turned their attention from her and began firing at him. He watched her, placidly, ignoring them. Shepard resumed running, and reached cover, closer to his end of the bridge.

He kept his sights on her a moment longer, before he noticed that his finger was resting on the trigger. _That_ was a mistake. He should _never_ have let his finger sit on the trigger while watching a friendly. For the first time in days, Garrus felt something—the beginnings of emotion. Emotion was something he hadn't felt in days, and—repressed for so long—it began to leak into his consciousness at high pressure—a horrible, raw, frustrated feeling, lurking in the back of his throat, and it triggered again the sense of nausea that he had felt at Shepard's arrival.

Abruptly, the salarian in Shepard's squad broke cover, sprinting daintily along on his lanky legs. Garrus crushed the rising levels of foaming, caustic anxiety and covered him. The gunmen either did not notice the salarian, or mistook him for one of their own, distracted as they were with trying to land a shot on the turian, hidden up above. The salarian remained un-shot-at, up until the point he retreated behind nearer cover, similarly, and launched another high explosive at the mercenary fodder. The end of the bridge erupted in flame, for the second time.

The stragglers fell back in confusion, and began blindly firing across the whole span of the bridge, trying to assess the new threat. The trio of friendlies below laid into them savagely, grabbing the opportunity as it came.

The krogan broke cover. Shepard and the salarian laid suppressing fire. The krogan reached cover. Shepard broke cover. The salarian and the krogan provided suppressing fire, Shepard reached cover. They moved up, across the bridge, measure by measure—faster and with less care as their confidence built in Garrus's ability to cover them from above. Then they were in the building. He heard gunfire outside in the hall, _were the mercenaries that close to getting me?_ His eyes searched the path outside for more intruders. He took a shot, and a turian outside collapsed—his neck snapped by the impact of the bolt going through his head.

The door opened behind him.

"Archangel?" Shepard's voice called out; her clear, hard voice, ringing out like the voice of a turian phalanx general out of legend, calling from beyond the grave.

Garrus's mind slowed down. His thoughts were suspended and clear.

He did not look behind him. Not yet.

If it was Shepard, what would he say? Assuming that he, Garrus, was not completely insane, what would he say to her?

If she was alive—how could she be alive? Had she been away on a mission? Had she been in deep cover as a Spectre, unable to contact him?

Movement caught his eye. The bridge was clear, now—the arrival of reinforcements as proficient as the three aliens who had stormed up the bridge to join him had quite seriously made reconsider anyone who was thinking of fighting him. _Except for that guy. Hm._

A human was crouching behind a pillar, peering into the base of the building—trying to figure out if—did Garrus dare say it—if _Shepard_ was still in the lower floor.

Garrus held up a dreamy finger. _One moment please, Shepard. _He felt strange. She was dead.

No she wasn't.

Yes she was.

_Wasn't she?_

He pulled the trigger. The human died.

He stood up slowly, and turned around, and there she was.

She craned her head, looking at his mask from an angle, trying to see past the reflection of his visor. She wiped sweat out of her eyes and squinted appraisingly. Her face was stained with soot from the fire below, her eyes were red and watery, and there was a long stream of blood running down one side of her face, from when her shields must have been depleted. Her face, he realized, her face had been _shredded_. Not in the firefight now, but some time in the past, something had happened to her—an ugly spiderweb of scars were etched across her cheeks and brow, and beneath them, sunk into grooves along the surface, was the glimmer of cybernetic patchwork, holding her skin and bone together.

But it was her.

And suddenly Garrus felt more tired than he had ever felt in his life. No sooner had he stood up, than he was seized with an incredible, overwhelming urge to sit down again.

She'd called him Archangel. Did she—

Was it possible that she came here without even knowing who he was?

How _could_ she know who Archangel was. No-one knew who he was.

He gripped his helmet by the fringe guard and slowly pulled it off.

He saw Shepard's face go blank with shock. Shepard's hands flew up to her forehead, and she clasped them around her temples.

Garrus sat down, heavily, and tried to think of something to say. Somethings did not come. Shepard ran her gauntleted hands back through her hair, wordlessly, her eyes still fixed on him in astonishment.

"Shepard," he said, finally.

Saying her name, and hearing his own voice out loud for the first time in—a very long time—brought him into harsh, clanging contact with reality.

This was real. She was really here.

* * *

Garrus shook his head faintly, in incredulity.

"I thought you were dead," he said.

Shepard's mouth was open. She gaped, then her expression of shock resolved into a broad, brilliant smile.

"Garrus!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"

He looked at her, blankly. He looked at her smile. She was surprised to see him—and happy? Happy.

And for a moment, Garrus felt happy.

Then, the feeling drained away. His head swam. He opened his mouth to reply.

"Just keeping my skills sharp," he said, after a moment, "a little target practice."

The inane joke fell out of his mouth, unbidden. It was habit, more than anything else.

Shepard's exuberant smile faded at the edges.

"You okay?" she asked, in concern. She cocked her head the other way, examining his face carefully.

Garrus felt her scrutiny on his face, and his gaze dropped to the floor.

"Been better," he said, passing off on the question, "but it sure is good to see a friendly face. Killing mercs is hard work, especially on my own," he added glibly.

It _was_ good, it was...

It was wonderful, but there was something wrong. Something was wrong.

Shepard spoke again.

"You nailed me good a couple times, by the way," she laughed, broadly, easily. It was too easy. Something about her laugh...

He felt too tired to figure it out. He was sore and he was stiff, and he hadn't slept in three days, and it was catching up to him.

"Concussive round only," he said, blandly, "no harm done. Didn't want the mercs getting suspicious."

"Uh-huh," agreed Shepard with played up sarcasm, "sure." He rarely saw her so actively playful, rarer so in a fire-fight. Her eyes sparkled.

He met her gaze for a moment, and her eyes lit up brighter. Her eyes: her dark, serious, intelligent eyes, staring at him out of two years of long-buried history, were laughing now. _Hey old friend!, _they said. Garrus stared back, wooden-faced.

He looked down again, the feeling of wrongness in his chest was beginning to germinate into the beginning of aggravation.

"If I'd wanted to do more than take your shields down, I'd have done it," he said, coolly and matter-of-fact, and then suddenly, without quite knowing why he said it, he added, "and you were taking your sweet time getting up here. I needed to get you moving."

It wasn't a kind thing to say to someone who had just come to rescue him, and it was not even necessarily true. He looked at Shepard and saw her face fall, slightly.

Shepard looked at him; the laugh had faded from her eyes. For a moment, he could see a faint... expression, pass across her face, a ripple of muscles twitching, revealing some emotion that he could not decipher. Then the expression vanished.

In the silence, the salarian coughed; the krogan stared at Garrus unkindly and Garrus began to feel surprised at the way he was acting. The drone of Omega filled the room; there was a distant, slushy whoosh of steam; the uneasy wailing of a hovercar.

"Well, we got here," she Shepard evenly, "but I don't think getting out will be as easy."

"No it won't," said Garrus, after another, slightly uncomfortable pause, "that bridge has saved my life: funneling all those witless idiots into scope. But, it works both ways, they'll slaughter us if we try to get out that way."

The salarian spoke up at this point.

"Range box choke-point," he said, briskly, "solid strategy—but, heard mercenaries say you collapsed tunnels—no plans for getting out—famous last stand? Archangel, Hero of Omega?"

Garrus breathed a hollow laugh.

"Up 'till this point, yes, and—Archangel... was just a name the locals gave me, for," he paused, "all my good deeds," he finished. He glanced at Shepard, she was watching him, there was nothing unfriendly about her face, but the smile had gone. _She's shut off_—he realized. He finally recognized the look: it was her bland, inoffensive look she wore when she was talking to people she didn't know especially well, or whom she didn't like, or when she was unsure of how to react.

"It's just Garrus, to you, if that's alright, or 'Vakarian'," he added, to the salarian.

Shepard obviously knew something was going on, and that they didn't have time to figure it out right now, and so she'd simply put it away. It was that trick he'd learned from her: shutting off your feelings and considering what the moment gave you, detached and objective. He decided to do the same. Enough time to wrestle with his emotions later, for now—_now _it was time to deal with the mercenaries.

"It's not completely suicidal, though," he went on, "this place has held them off, so far. And with the three with you…" He looked around, "I suggest we hold this location, wait for a crack in their defences—"

"Take our chances?" asked Shepard, rhetorically.

"It's not a perfect plan," said Garrus, nodding in agreement, "but it's a plan."

Shepard nodded simply: "It'll do," she replied.

And they were off. It did not take long for the mercenaries to discover that their forward assault team had failed, and they had rapidly run out of recruits to pick up off the streets of Omega.

It did not take long for their plan to be revealed, either. Garrus had a feeling that it was coming. When the first Blood Pack krogan crashed through the debris of the collapsed tunnel, down below, Garrus knew it was the beginning of the end of something. He would've expected, under other circumstances, for it to be the end of him—he had planned to sit in this room, shooting until he stopped moving completely—but now.

Now Shepard was here.

Why was she here?

He carefully put the thought aside. He couldn't let himself _think_, now. Thinking complicated things.

She was here, though, and the plan had changed. His mind flew, combat ready again. The shutters, in the basement; he directed Shepard and her other squad member—she had left the krogan with him—to close the emergency blast shutters around the building. Nearly every Omega building had them, it wasn't paranoia, it was just good sense in this neighbourhood. It wouldn't hold them off forever, but the tide was changing in the battle, and predicting where things would go from here was becoming an increasing non-issue.

The shutters were closed, and the guns were up. Garrus heard the fight break out below, as the returning team began chasing the invaders up the stairs behind him. The krogan that had stayed with Garrus ran out of the room in the direction of the fight, yelling unintelligible fury. He smiled, grimly, people who found themselves on the other end of a krogan charge often regretted it.

"_Garrus, you still okay?_" The radio buzzed; Shepard, "_Grunt, where'd you leave him,_"

"_He's just behind me,_" boomed the bassy crackle of the krogan's voice, "_we're alright_."

Then drone of Omega seemed to get louder.

"_Shepard_," Garrus heard the thinner voice of the salarian, "_eyes up—incoming—three o'clock._"

"What is it?" Garrus queried over the radio.

The drone seemed to becoming more rhythmical, it increased in volume.

"_What are we looking at_," Shepard, her voice clipped and efficient.

"_Not sure yet_," said the salarian, "_bad profile—some kind of ship_."

"Shepard?" Garrus asked. He knew what it was, though. The gunship was coming back. He raced to the window that looked over the bridge, and scoped down the line of buildings on either side of his. No gunship. The noise was getting very loud. He cautiously, quickly, craned his head out and looked up. No gunship above. Maybe on the roof..? No roof access to the building, though, so what were they—

"_Okay, keep down, if it—Garrus? Garrus, are you under cover? It's_—"

"**_ARCHANGEL_**," howled a voice, booming over the gunship PA. The source of the back-ground droning that had been getting louder and louder finally sailed into view.

Garrus turned, and there it was. In front of the OTHER window.

He turned, and began to run for cover. The gunship opened fire. He staggered as his shield vanished, and bolts began to collide with his armour. A shock ripped through his arm, and he saw a flare of sparks out of the corner of his eye. _Armour breached. Not good. _His shields whined in his ears, desperately fighting for space to build up a charge as he crawled to cover. Another bolt connected with him. He felt a tug on his right mandible, and felt a rush of air and blood enter his mouth.

"**_You think you can screw with the Blue Suns?_**" bellowed the PA voice.

"_Garrus, are you okay?"_ Shepard's voice sizzled in his ears.

Behind cover, finally, Garrus probed with his tongue. There was a hole through his mandible. _Great_, he thought dizzily, as his deadened and scorched nerve endings woke up and began to complain, _another problem I don't need. _He wouldn't be able to sight down his gun properly without making it worse. His face was going to start hurting very soon, _as soon as I get out of shock_, he thought, with little emotion.

And he _was_ going into shock, he could feel it. He looked down at his arm. Blood gushed from an inside seam in the metal. _Not the best of luck, _a bolt had hit a weak point. He tried to flex his fingers, and found that they could not move. _Hm. This could be a problem._

He heard Shepard's frantic voice calling in his earpiece. Heard clattering outside. Soon he wouldn't be able to shoot at all, it was now or never. He broke cover, awkwardly, lifting his gun up to bring his sights on the nose of the ship. He winced as the stock of the rifle brushed against his face, but kept going, trying to get a bead on a sensitive part of the ship.

_"**This ends NOW!**"_ screamed the gunship's pilot.

* * *

Garrus saw the hatch open in the gunships' hull. Saw the rocket pod emerge. He turned, and ran—trying to get to deeper cover.

He heard a crack and a swish, behind him. The rocket had launched.

He _felt_ the force and heat of the explosion. He didn't hear it; he was deafened, instantly.

An impact like a huge, burning boot kicked Garrus across the room. His face went numb as the snap of the shockwave introduced a thousand tears in the exposed surface of his skin, and his head rattled about inside his mantle like a billiard ball. A piece of white-hot metal punched a second hole into his mandible, skewering his tongue and pinning it to the inside of his mouth.

He hit the ground. He bounced off the ground. He landed again. He could feel the rough surface of the floor dragging on his armour, sending him tumbling. He rolled over, twice, before landing in an awkward heap on the floor. His head rang, the room swirled. The walls warped and rippled, bowing inward as if they were breathing.

He saw Shepard run in. Her eyes were wide, her teeth were bared. A human smile and human distress could be confused, sometimes, but Garrus had grown to understand human expressions from his time on the Normandy—Shepard's expressions especially. The two of them had spent so much time together that sometimes Garrus forgot he was looking at a human face instead of a turian one.

Shepard's face was pulled into a horrified rictus now as she sprinted towards him, ignoring the gunfire. Shepard had never looked like that, before, did she? Not as far as Garrus remembered. She looked terrified now.

Maybe he was just imagining all this.

_Maybe_, he thought blearily, _she isn't here after all._

The last, tormented halucinations of a man straining to come to terms with where his life had ended. He'd failed Shepard, he'd failed his family, he'd failed Omega, he'd failed his team._  
_

Shepard grabbed him, tried to pull him to cover. The salarian appeared behind her, put his hand on her arm, stopped her. Shepard was asking Garrus a question. Garrus moved his mouth, slowly—agonizingly. The piece of metal through his tongue clicked against his palate. Garrus wasn't sure if he made any sound, or even what words his mouth formed. He looked in her eyes and saw blazing panic burning in them.

Maybe this was a dream. Maybe he would wake up.

The gunship opened fire again, and Shepard's face disappeared from his view. Garrus couldn't turn and see where she'd gone. He couldn't move. Black spots shifted behind his vision, blotching out things he should have thought were important, but he no longer had the energy or focus to care about. Gunfire bounced off the wall in front of him. He stared at it blankly.

Maybe he was just crazy.

Blood gushed from Garrus's arm. His face, half of which hung off of his skull like a slab of useless meat, oozed thick, chessylite-coloured drops of it. He could see it running down the ridge of his eye sockets, in his peripheral vision. A drop of blood slid into his right eye and he squinted, unable to shift the stinging liquid which obscured his vision.

Bullets streamed through the wall, tearing shavings off of the metal and sending a waterfall of sparks to the floor of the miserable building.

The world of Omega stretched away from him, getting smaller and smaller, and Garrus began to feel like he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. His arm—flopped out in front of him in a pool of his blood—seemed to be stretching away from his body and drifting off into the distance as he stared at it through a long, dark tunnel, which only got longer and darker as the world slid out of sight.

Maybe Shepard was still dead.

Garrus felt an explosion rumble silently through his bones. He blinked, blearily, as the building shook around him.

Maybe he was dead, too.


	2. Ground Zero

"Garrus!"

Shepard skidded to a stop in front of the turian's body, sliding down behind cover. Garrus lay there, staring blindly at the sky, his breath coming quick and shallow.

"Garrus, are you alright—? Hold on, I'll get you out of—"

She had grabbed his shoulder, and was making ready to pull him to cover, when she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up sharply to see Mordin, the salarian—lips compressed thinly, chin angled towards the turian. He was hunched down behind what had been some kind of counter, beckoning her back.

"Shepard," Mordin said, urgently, "his spine—no way to tell if fractured—keep him still—battle needs finishing."

She turned back to Garrus. The turian lay, bent awkwardly in half, one arm pinned under his armour. His eyes—crystal blue irises set in black scleras—stared fixedly out at the world, darting back and forth to track unseen shapes. Shepard couldn't tell if he could see her or not, turian faces were hard to read at the best of times, and there was nothing in her friend's rigid expression to suggest he could tell she was there.

"Garrus," she said, trying to speak loudly and clearly above the noise around her, "Hey, Garrus, can you hear me? Can you—" she felt her voice beginning to shake as the next layer of adrenaline pouring into her system lit up her nerve endings and flooded her muscles, "tell me if you can feel your legs, or—"

She heard gunfire, and her brain kicked into gear. She leapt away from the turian reflexively, drawing the incoming stream of bolts away from where he lay. The twin M350 cannons on the front of the gunship roared, spitting out a line of bullets that lit up the air in the room.

She landed behind cover, sniffed heavily, rubbed at her chest. The bullets splashed across the room, shredding curls of splintered metal out of the walls and sending them bouncing and scattering across the floor.

Shepard couldn't get Garrus, now, she knew; panic fluttered in her chest as options flitted behind her eyes—one gunship, evenly spaced cover, two windows: they could get under the window sills, to avoid rocket fire; or they could stagger themselves around the room, to cover each other from both angles; they could trade off shooting ranges, rapidly, moving from segment to segment of the room to keep the gunship off balance—she knew that mantis ships weren't incredibly mobile when it came to lateral movement, their mass damping fields couldn't allow fo—for

She coughed, awkwardly. Something was caught in her throat. She tried to clear her throat, and found that there was something blocking it—a tight, hard twist, that made breathing hard and seemed to—

She closed her eyes, tightly. She had been so happy to see him. Just for a moment, the galaxy was a brighter place, but then… She understood, she was sure, why Garrus had looked at her like that. The quiet accusation in his voice. The question.

_'Where were you?'_

And now, a minute later, he was grievously, terribly injured, unable to hear her, (unable to see her?).

_Garrus, please—_

She opened her eyes again, and caught Mordin's gaze. The salarian was looking at her with concern, bordering on worry.

"Shepard…" he began.

"_No_," she said, quickly, "I'm fine. Use the north-east corner of the wall, trade back and forth if it tries to get a bearing on us by switching windows."

She knew the worried look on the salarian's face had not been for her feelings. Shepard was supposed to lead them, and if she fell apart now, not only would they have to be without a commander, they would have to support a compromised teammate.

"Grunt," she said, forcefully, willing herself through the vortex of feelings in her chest.

"_You with us, Shepard?_" Grunt's voice rumbled dryly through her earpiece.

"Stay back to the wall—south—your shoulders will make too big of a target for any of the floor cover. You have a big gun—work the missile pods, and the engines if you get an angle."

"_Alright._"

"Mordin," Shepard turned briskly back to the salarian, "how do you feel about fire?"

"Blind him," said the salarian, brightening up, "solid idea—weaken canopy?"

"Yeah," she said, "I'll try and get an impact shot through."

"_**You can't save Archangel!**_" the batarian inside the gunship cockpit bellowed, in triumphant rage, "_**you get in the way of the Blue Suns and we'll tear your world down, we—!**_"

Shepard broke cover long enough to let off a single, high-powered shot. It burst off the armoured canopy of the gunship, momentarily stunning the pilot into silence. The gunship swerved, and opened fire again. A rush of gunfire splash off the wall behind Shepard, as she dropped to the floor again. Mordin ducked out from behind the wall, and launched a searing plasma bolt, which sailed across the room, and lit up the front of the gunship. Searing plasma residue roiled across the ship's armour—the burnt olive colour-coat evaporated and bubbled out of the surface of the metal it had been ingrained into.

She leapt upright. The gunship fired. She dove to the side, fired back. Metal popped—the canopy was weakened. The gunship fired. Missile pods opened. Wrex took a shot. The missile veered off awkwardly. Shepard littered the cockpit with bullets. The gunship spit a pair of rockets through the windows of the building and rolled away.

"Get down!" Shepard called.

Boom.

Garrus' body moved, half-rolled over by the force of one of the explosions. Shards of metal like burning dust scattered across his face, ripped his battered skin into smaller and smaller shreds.

"No!" Shepard yelled, unable to stop herself.

She couldn't see the turian's breathing through the heavy layers of his armour, and it terrified her. She leaned over, trying to see if she could see movement on his face.

Movement. His mandibles twitched, contracting tightly to his face. He was trying to regulate his breathing, she could tell—which meant he was going into shock, and he knew it.

The gunship circled them cannily, its pilot turning the cockpit to the side as it hovered, in an effort to catch any incoming fire on its relatively undamaged flanks.

Shepard let off another impact shot. The chunk of metal hissed through the air, and struck a point on the gunship's nosecone. The ship bucked and swerved. There was a moment while it wobbled uncertainly in the air, and then it departed.

Silence.

Shepard was at Garrus' side instantly.

"Mordin," she said, "quickly: how's he doing?"

Mordin appeared at her elbow.

"Blood loss—hm—entry wound..." he said, "There. Crack in armour—bolt would've entered—grazed an artery perhaps. Medigel? ...inactive. Good."

"Good?" queried Shepard, warily.

"Vakarian," said Mordin, loudly, "_Vakarian_, Can you hear me—"

Garrus gurgled, snorting blood and crusted dirt. He coughed.

"Archangel, can you hear me," said Mordin.

"What do you mean 'good'?" Shepard asked, concern over-riding her reluctance to interrupt the salarian as he tended to her friend.

Garrus breathed, hoarsely. He blinked, his eyes—creased in pain—focused. His jaw trembled as he fought to speak.

"Ss—g..." he said, "th..." his eyes flickered, and began to drift closed.

"_Archangel_," said Mordin, louder, "Archangel, you have to l—"

"Garrus," Shepard shouted, "_Garrus!_"

Garrus's eyes snapped open. His entire body seized, bending in half like a fish, as he struggled to sit upright. Mordin caught him, held him still.

"Now, don't move," he said, quickly, "G—" he looked at Shepard, and she reflexively avoided his gaze, for reasons she wasn't sure of.

"Garrus," he went on, turning back to Garrus, trying to keep him upright and stable, and struggling against the weight of his huge, armoured frame, "can you understand me."

Garrus tried to move his mouth, stopped. A groan escaped his throat. Shepard saw the piece of metal pinning his tongue to the inside of his mouth and the fluttering creature of panic in her chest leapt and turned over; her fingers twitched as the urge to help—to do _something_—ran through her body again.

She caught Mordin's eye.

"Garrus," she said, "just nod."

After a second, he nodded, stiffly.

"Do you know where you are?" asked Mordin.

Garrus, after some hesitation, held up his left hand, awkwardly. Finger and thumb curled around each other, facing down. _Omega_, thought Shepard.

"Omega," said Mordin, Garrus nodded. "Do you remember us?"

Nod. Eyes flickered to meet Shepard's gaze. Another, slower nod.

"Good, can you feel your legs?"

Groan. Nod.

Somewhere in the back of Shepard's mind, a warning alarm went off. She sat upright, leaning back onto her heels, looking around for the source of the alarm.

Nothing presented itself to her senses, but something... something in the room was wrong.

Mordin talked quietly to Garrus, assessing, diagnosing. Shepard stood upright, the warning was getting stronger. Was it—

The noise? The sound of Omega seemed to be getting… louder.

She sprinted over to one of the windows, then to the next. No sight of the gunship anywhere. Nothing beneath, nothing above, but still...

She listened carefully. There was a gentle crackling in her ear—noise coming across the radio. Their communications were encrypted, but Omega was a hive of radio activity, communications, legitimate radio, pirate broadcasts, shadow networks. No-one could get a clear channel on Omega.

Mordin was rapping gently on the back of Garrus' armour, pressing, trying to gauge where, if anywhere, the turian's spine was injured.

The oppressive, warning feeling grew. The mantis gunships were remarkably quiet, and it was hard to discern their noise from the muted, echoing ocean roar of Omega, but Shepard was almost sure that she could hear it. She stared around the room, listening to the noise intently.

She noticed Grunt, the krogan, looking at her in thought.

"What is it," he said.

She stared mutely at him, then shook her head. _I don't know._

He looked at her, and then wandered slowly over to the window. He rested an arm on it and looked out. To the passing observer, he was just taking in the view, but Shepard immediately realized the uncharacteristic deliberation with which he moved. He was purposefully acting casual. He could feel it, too.

Mordin was passing his omnitool over the glistening, blue-black fissure in the Garrus's armour, and the omnitool's display caught Shepard's eye. Seen through the reverse, it was too skewed for her universal translator to decipher the salarian symbols, but she immediately recognized the leaf/node abstraction of the Medigel interface. The salarian was dangerously low on the stuff.

"I'll do it," said Shepard, quickly, reflexively, reaching to brush his arm away, "You only have two capsules left; you don't have to use your supply on him just because he's my friend."

Mordin glanced at her, archly.

"Shepard," he said, "intentions admirable—but, not doing it as a favour. Archangel—Vakarian rather—competent soldier—held off three mercenary groups—I would think th…" He stopped.

Shepard was conscious that he was staring at her, but her attention was suddenly elsewhere. A noise she had just heard, a microscopic clang, a flattened note barely on the edge of hearing. She spun to face the window, gun drawn.

"The roof," said Mordin. He leapt upright to join her.

Taut ropes sang and hissed. Shapes swung through the windows—bone-bleached rings on sky-blue—glowing eye-plates shining like lamps in the dark. Blue Suns.

"Grunt!" Shepard called warningly.

Grunt was already in action. One of them had rappelled in barely three feet from where Grunt had been waiting by the window. Before Shepard had begun to fire, the krogan—a huge knot of muscles bound to a hair-trigger impulse for violence—had swung the butt of his gun around, broad-siding one man back out into the empty space beyond the building.

Shepard scattered fire across the first wave, trying to reach as many as possible before they could orient themselves, and the mercenaries dove for cover. She kept firing until the the gun's heat-stop went off before reaching for her shot-gun—There were too many for her to keep down with spread-fire, and it wouldn't take them long to realize it, she had to—

Her hand came away from the assault rifle tacky. She looked at it, quickly, assessing.

Blue. She had touched Garrus while trying to drag him to safety, and his blood had come off on her hands. All over her hands. It was painted on up to her elbows. Beneath her, Shepard could see more of the blood, spreading across the floor, into the cracks, against the soles of her boots.

It took only a few fractions of a second before she swung back into action, but she knew, suddenly, that if she did not get him help quickly, Garrus was going to die.

With that, the last shred of caution she had been holding on to evaporated. She brought her shotgun up and vaulted across the room. She planted her feet wide, ready to bolt, and poured three rapid shotgun blasts into the faces of mercenaries near to her. One of them screamed and toppled back, the other fell silently, blood spilling from his suddenly inactive eye-plates. Shepard sprung forward into cover again as the other mercenaries realized what was happening and began to open fire. She turned and let off another shot. Shepard worked to her own plan—trusting in her squad to know what to do in a close firefight, and they did.

Mordin fell back into the dark interior of the building, drawing in the mercenaries and outflanking them. Grunt leapt from window to window, unleashing the contents of his shotgun, and surprising and disorienting new members to the firefight as they swung through.

The battle raged on between the two groups. Shepard found herself fighting with desperate abandon, all but throwing herself physically at the mercenaries to take them down.

The gunship appeared again.

Shepard destroyed it.

She saw it appear, and the thought crystallized in her mind.

_No_.

She skidded across the floor, low, kneecapping someone with the flat of her gun. He fell hard to the ground, and she rolled over, slamming the gun butt into the back of his neck. Mass effect fields did not react well to slow projectiles and Shepard heard his neck pop. She hurled herself forward again, over cover. One of the gunship's bolts caught her shield, and she felt the charge die, felt the electric tension go out of the air around her.

She dropped to the ground.

"Mordin, cover me."

_"Just a tick."_

_Froosh._ The wall of flame cast light across the room, illuminating even the shadowed corner Shepard hid in.

_"Shepard,"_ Mordin's voice spoke quietly in her earpiece, _"you're charging it—feel I must point out: it's a gunship—plans?_"

Shepard's mind raced. No. No plans. She'd run at it in desperation. What had she been hoping to do?

She looked down at the weapon in her hand. A shotgun. Shotguns couldn't touch armour, they spread out too much force across the surface. At best she could—

Yes she did. She did have a plan. Her breathing sped up. She sat up against the heavy bench which had sheltered her. She toggled a switch on the side of her shotgun. It blinked and chirruped at her, and a different symbol popped up on the free-floating HUD the weapon projected.

"Ice," she said into the radio. She stood up, brought up her shotgun. She heard the guns mounted on its nose begin to spin up. She could see the pilot's figure through the glowing, cherry-red composite glass and the smoking metal. The world seemed to slow down. Shepard pulled the trigger.

The blast of her shotgun was a cone of fine powder snow—glimmering white—drifting down to the city below in the wake of the cold, amazingly cold, super-chilled metal shrapnel—cooled to two hundred degrees below zero—which was pounded flat into the surface of the gunship by the force of the blast. The gun bounced off her shoulder and back onto the trigger finger, firing again, and again.

_**BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM**_

The armour on the front of the gunship screamed. Rivets popped out of their sockets. The edges of the armour around the canopy buckled and split at the edges, and the glass shattered, instantly, tearing into shards as the ice-cold shot warped and cracked the too-hot metal.

The smoking shotgun fell from Shepard's hands, her shoulder was numb, her arm felt like it had been pulled out of her socket. The blood on her hands sizzled and steamed. Shepard heard the gunship firing. She reached for her pistol. A bolt hit her shield, which dropped out of commission. She brought the pistol up. Felt something pull at her stomach, her left shoulder.

She aimed. She fired.

The gunship pilot jerked in his seat. Slumped. The gunship stopped firing. It hovered there, in the air, a few meters away.

Shepard turned around, started to run to Garrus. She blinked, grunted, looked down. Blood leaked from her armour—a bolt had punctured the weave protecting her flank, and a rivulet of blood ran down her stomach and across the inside of her leg. She looked at her shoulder. A piece of the pauldron had been shattered, and the metal splinter that had done it had been deflected into her collar-bone, where it stuck half-in and half-out of—of...

It was better not to think about it.

She felt dizzy.

Her suit alerted her to her medical condition with an alarm. In a second or two, she heard micro-motors inside the suit's core begin to whir. Pumps cycled. Medigel was being distributed.

Soon, she stopped feeling the uneasy distress which her body provided as a precursor to actual pain. A blue-green foam slowly crackled through the tear in her suit. She felt it expand through the weave around her shoulder, and it quickly mantled the chunky metal shred that was currently occupying shared space with her collarbone.

Mordin had wasted very little time getting Garrus mobile. After establishing that his spine wasn't damaged, the salarian had administered the rest of the Medigel—cannibalizing a spent capsule—the only one left—from Garrus's non-functioning suit.

Grunt had scooped the turian up in his arms, and carried him downstairs. Shepard had done her best to hurry after them, but something gave in her stomach, and she found herself listing awkwardly as she walked.

The salarian buzzed around outside her head, attempting to talk to her about her condition. She tried to focus. She couldn't.

She had to.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" she said, turning to the salarian.

"Best not to run in your condition—trauma—damaged dorsal musculature—could result in a tear."

"Garrus," she said. Thinking had begun to be a labour.

"Recommend walking anyway," replied Mordin, quietly, gently, "will arrive faster if you're conscious."

Shepard looked at him.

"Yes," she said. She looked down at her omnitool, thumbed through it. Prodded clumsily at the virtual button. _LTS ADMN._ Unity.

There was a whir as her suit used up the remainder of her Medigel capsule. She felt the haze in her mind clear, replaced by an icy, but lucid, stillness. Her body tingled, at the same time conveniently going numb in all the places it hurt. The cuff of her omnitool ejected the capsule with a _thoomp_, and it bounced off the floor, rolling away behind her as she strode on.

They walked across the bridge. In the distance, the gunship floated, lifeless. Listing slightly, it drifted slowly away from the building, into the depths of Omega.

They walked through the makeshift barricades and fortifications, in silence, that the three mercenary groups had installed—now abandoned in the face of their failure.

Near the end of the complex, they were accosted. A group of ragged, nervous thugs approached, bearing a dubious assortment of weapons.

"Wh—" one of them asked, mildly taken aback by the sight of the four battered fighters. "Hey, how's the battle goin'. What's goin' on?"

Shepard looked at him.

"It's over," she said, simply.

"Oh... Oh!" The young man's voice sounded noticeably happier, behind his face mask. "Did we win?"

"...Yeah," said Shepard, tiredly, "we did."

She gave the mercenary a punch on the arm, and she and her squad traipsed onward towards the landing where the batarian Blue Suns had dropped them off. Behind them, she heard the hired guns begin to converse happily and with bravado, talking about whether or not they could expect to get their money, and what they would do with it once it was theirs.

They met the batarian driver. He approached them with his weapon drawn. Asked them what they thought they were doing with Archangel, and what happened.

"We killed everyone," said Shepard.

The driver said he didn't believe them, he circled them—still pointing his weapon at them—and retreated into the abandoned headquarters. After a while, she heard distant cursing.

They commandeered the Blue Suns' car, and drove back to the parking lot from which they had made their departure 20 minutes earlier. It seemed, to Shepard, like hours ago.

"EDI," said Shepard into her radio, finally breaking the exhausted quiet that hung over the group.

"Commander?" EDI's reply was prompt and efficient. It was past midnight, or what passed for midnight on the forsaken hull of Omega. EDI did not need to wake up.

"Get Joker," Shepard said.

"Would you like the Normandy to begin departure preparations?" EDI's voice was quiet, placid.

"No, we're not leaving yet," Shepard said, woodenly. She was too tired to express her emotions. Far too tired. "It's… It's complicated."

"Mr. Moreau is sleeping, Commander. This is not his shift."

Quiet, placid… Reproving? Did computers do that? Shepard struggled to find a way to explain what had happened to the ship's computer. _I lost a friend, got him back, and I'm about to lose him again. An old shooting buddy is visiting. We're being shaken down by an ex-cop. Stop asking me questions._

"He'll want to be awake for this," Shepard said, "get Dr. Chakwas up, too. Tell her to get ready for a patient—we're bringing in Archangel—he's in trouble."

"…Yes Commander," the subtle rebuke in EDI's voice, real or imagined, had gone. The radio was silent, except for the occasional crackle of static. They walked on, through crowds, toward the ship. A few people they passed stared, most didn't.

Jeff 'Joker' Moreau's voice came across the radio.

"Commander," he said, drowsy and irritable, "I was in the middle of this dream, okay? It was perfect, and I am going to regret waking up from it for the rest of my life, so if you can't tell me why EDI gr—"

"We found Garrus."

"Wh—Garrus?" He sounded no less sleepy, but mildly impressed, "You found Garrus on _Omega_?"

"Garrus was Archangel. He's been badly injured, we're bringing him in now."

"…Hhhow injured is badly injured?" asked Joker, cautiously, "is he…"

"It—he's not doing well," Shepard said, feeling bleak, awkward, and horribly helpless, "I thought you might as well know."

"… Shit," whispered Joker.

"We'll be there in a minute."

They were there in a minute. Upon request, the airlock decontamination cycle was skipped.

From there, the night passed in an anxious, blurred haze. Shepard sat outside the medical bay, staring blankly at the floor. She couldn't sleep, but she was too tired to stay awake. Joker tried to stay up with her, to keep her company, but he was never especially good at handling tense situations.

"Hey Commander," he'd said, Shepard looked up at him.

"He'll—he'll be alright," he'd said.

"Right?" he'd asked, vaguely addressing the ceiling, "Won't he, EDI? Probably?"

"I cannot say," EDI replied, "the extent of his injuries defy my ability to—"

"Nevermind EDI," Jeff said, hurriedly, "Nevermind, it's—it's good, EDI, it's good."

Joker had grumbled something about robots and souls and basic feelings and—eventually defeated—he'd hobbled back to bed.

Once or twice Shepard got up and paced awkwardly back and forth across the broad room—through the mess, to Miranda's quarters and back. Miranda was asleep, Shepard supposed—nothing to wake her. Eventually, Shepard began to hurt again—her untreated wounds complained. EDI noticed, inquired. Shepard shrugged it off.

As shifts changed, people began to notice her. Rumour began to creep around the ship that Commander Shepard's Friend Archangel was in trouble. As Joker's shift began, and, Shepard assumed, the pilot had woken up and started talking, things got more drastic sounding.

He was another Spectre, (almost). He was about to die (nearly). He'd bled all over the deck when he came in. He had a giant hole in his face. EDI didn't know if he could be saved.

The cook, waking up to make what constituted breakfast on the ship, had awkwardly shuffled around and offered her coffee, or some kind of meal. She'd thanked him, but she knew she couldn't eat now. The cook had looked so dismal at this, that she almost felt bad, and quickly realized that perhaps she could do with a cup of coffee, after all.

He had pumped her a steel mugful of the black brew, and it sat, steaming hot and oily, on the bench beside her.

Eventually, to lend to the appearance, she took a sip.

It was not the flavour (bitter) or the caffeine—but something about the hot liquid pouring down into her stomach woke part of her up. It was soothing—almost relaxing—and Shepard had drank about half of the cup, when Dr. Chakwas emerged, exhausted, and informed her that Garrus was stable.

Shepard stood up, sharply.

"You're sure?" she said, tersely, almost not wanting to believe it, horribly afraid in case it wasn't true.

"Yes," replied the doctor with a tired smile, "It was difficult, but Mr. Solus and I have managed to put our friend back together, I think."

Shepard looked at her, blankly. Then Shepard laughed—a hollow, weak laugh.

"Can—" her voice was hoarse, she tried to stop it grating, and whispered, "can I see him?"

"He'll be asleep, but… yes, you may."

Shepard stepped into the medical bay, as if she was stepping into a temple. She stepped over discarded pieces of Garrus' armour and slowly approached the flat, medical bed, where Mordin Solus stood, changed out of his own armour and into awkwardly fitting surgical garb.

"Ah, Shepard," he said, looking up from the control interface of the surgical system which hung, inactive now and suspended from the ceiling, over the body of…

Garrus.

He lay there, quietly, and—turned as he was, his injured side facing away from the door—he looked...

Peaceful.

"Surgical procedure successful—expect full functional recovery in one to two weeks," said Mordin, "cosmetic recovery may take longer, of course, but…"

Mordin talked, but Shepard looked at Garrus.

He was wrapped in neat dressings, injuries had been tended to that Shepard had not even been aware were there. Most of his armour had been removed, and what remained had been covered with a sterile sheet, to prevent dust from reaching the wounds during surgery. Shepard could tell he was breathing now, his bared chest rose and fell, slowly, the thin plates in his skin catching the light as they shifted. The heart monitor nearby measured out the funny, skipping turian heartbeat. _Beep, beep-beep. Beep, beep-beep. Beep, beep-beep._

Mordin had finished talking. Shepard looked at him. He gazed back inscrutibly, and she thought he might be waiting for her to say something.

Shepard laughed again—another breathy, raggedy laugh. A sense of incredible relief surged through her body. She stood up, and felt a huge weight lifted off her shoulders. Her mind felt clean and unconcerned. She smiled—she could smile!

"He's," Shepard said, "he's c…"

She blacked out.


	3. Tactical Neural Implant

_He could feel the steps in his feet. He knew exactly where he was going to go._

_'It's not really a good place.'_

Garrus woke with a lurch.

As soon as he was conscious of his eyelids—the thin, fleshy gap separating him from the world, he tried his hardest to keep them open. As soon as feeling returned to his limbs, he struggled to sit upright. He tried to push himself up—and found he was having an amazing amount of difficulty. Adrenaline pumped through his body, and the associated rush let him mindlessly fight against the latent disability in his shaking limbs, but he still felt as if he was moving too slowly. He panicked. He was going to be late—he was going to be too late to—!

Something in his head.

He had been dreaming.

He grunted, groaned—he fell back, breathing heavily. His arms, he thought—his arm, his right arm, lay limply at his side—he held his forearm up over his head, dangling at the wrist. He looked at the layers of dressing. A Sirta ConWrap, some plastic gauze, and a pressure sleeve. There was also some kind of jelly on his arm—wiped away around the edges of the dressing to leave remaining the minutest, gleaming residue. His whole arm felt amazingly heavy and he let it flop down across his stomach.

_Well, that was a mistake,_ he thought. A distant tingling sensation from the impact ran up the length of the limb and into his shoulder. He remembered the hole in his armour, the burbling, cheerful fountain of his own blood through the crack in the metal, and grimaced reflexively.

He heard the distant _fzzzsh_ of a door opening and the approach of rapid footsteps.

"_What_ do you think you're doing," exclaimed an cold voice from somewhere in the room, where Garrus could not see it. He tried to crane his head up and around, and saw a slim, grey-haired figure stalking toward him.

Garrus drew in a surprised breath.

"Dr. Chakwas," he managed. He stared at her.

"You can't try and sit up with a hole in your arm," she said, her face burgeoning under hippocratic indignation—her eyes flashing, her lips pursed—"You snapped two tendons," she went on, "and the stitches are barely holding your skin together as it is. You are lucky enough to be alive, let alone have the use of your hand, and if you destroy all our hard work just because you don't have the sense to sit still after an operation, I will personally throw you out the airlock into the nearest star."

"Sorry," said Garrus, indistinctly, as soon as the presence of mind to speak returned to him.

He flopped back, and his head hit the thin pillow again

"…Your bedside manner is as soothing as ever," he added. "This must be a taste of what I'd be going through if I actually died."

Dr. Chakwas snorted derisively—although without much malice—as she examined his dressings.

"I thought Turians didn't believe in the afterlife," she said, "look, you're bleeding again."

"Oh, we do for the bad things," Garrus mumbled, "fire, eternal punishment… a soldier needs a bit of fear to keep him in check—fascinating concept—best thing humans brought us. That," he added, with the easy-going locution of the barely lucid, "and ramen noodles."

Garrus was aware he was slurring slightly and the sensation was creeping across his mind that he might not be making any sense.

"Shh!" Dr. Chakwas said. Garrus shushed.

Garrus stared at the ceiling. He was overwhelmed again. The weird, dreamy, slow-moving feel of unreality washed over him. Dr. Chakwas, another bizarre, displaced vision from the past, worked over him, talking a low-key, grumbling stream of disapproval as she discovered new places he had revisited his wounds in his first struggle to sit upright.

He looked at her.

"Tell me," he said, distantly, "am I—" he took another breath, "am I asleep?"

Dr. Chakwas paused and she looked at him intently. Then her face softened, and she smiled a small smile.

"No," she said. "You're not asleep."

"Am I crazy?"

Chakwas closed her eyes, for a moment, and the smile became subtly different; sad.

"No," she said, opening her eyes again, "you're not crazy. You were caught in a rather nasty explosion from what I hear," she went on, "I'm surprised you remember anything, to be honest. You're… you're on board with us now."

"Us," repeated Garrus.

"I'm not quite sure how to put this," she said, "you're on the Normandy."

Garrus felt his pulse speed up. He felt a cold sweat break out on his neck.

"What?" he asked. He tried to sit up again.

"Garrus you need to get your rest," she said, firmly, "and I don't—"

"No," he said, begin to feel breathless, "No! I need to—" he struggled to sit up, but his arm buckled underneath him.

"Garrus Vakarian!" Chakwas said, "I don't want to have to strap you to this table but I will."

"Please—" Garrus said, his thick, groggy voice failing to convey how desperately he needed to sit up, to see for himself.

Dr. Chakwas looked at him in agitation. Her careful bob cut was beginning to look frazzled and Garrus could see she had smears of blue… his blood on her. He relaxed. Chakwas did not force him down, however.

"Just, let me sit you up," she said, "stop struggling."

She helped him up, pulling him carefully upright. Garrus looked around, and...

"This isn't…" he said immediately, then he stopped. He looked around warily, "This isn't the Normandy—"

"The Normandy SR-2," she said, "you'll see."

"Shepard," he said, "Where—"

"She's fine," said Chakwas, soothingly, speaking over him, "She's just sleeping. She's doing much better than you were. You shouldn't even be awake, yet."

"Spirits," he said, "it was really her. What's she—Where did she come from? What happened to her?"

"I think she'd better tell you that herself, when she wakes up."

"What time is it?"

"Well officially it's oh-fifteen-hundred hours, but," she added with a wan smile, "who can tell, on a starship? She's just resting," she went on, "She lost a little blood, and suffered several gunshot wounds, but nothing critical was hit. She's been through a lot worse. You both have, I should expect."

Chakwas rested her hand on his shoulder. Garrus nodded, wordlessly.

Chakwas gently applied pressure down on his shoulder, and he relented. He slowly, awkwardly lay down again, assisted by Dr. Chakwas's support.

"Oof," she grunted, "theeere you go. I'm too old to be lifting turians up and down, you know," she added, "I should be fixing you, not injuring myself."

"Sorry," Garrus managed to grunt, through the effort of supporting his torso.

"It's alright, just—" she looked at him, "don't make it worse than it is. You've already torn a couple of your stitches."

Garrus lay back on the thin bed, the flat, shiny plastic pillow, and sighed a deep sigh that might have been a yawn if he'd had the energy. He was exhausted, and right now, even though he wanted to stay up, to ask questions, he wasn't sure he could summon the energy to. He could be insane, he _could_ be, but…

His eyelids were heavy with unspent sleep. His body throbbed, dully. Pain was definitely there, but it had been drowned in a sea of painkillers and sedatives, it was just a quiet, urgent warning now, letting him know that he still couldn't do anything without injuring himself further.

Did insane people constantly wonder if they were insane? Wasn't that part of it? This bizarre dream state he seemed to be occupying was too consistent to be fake, too linear and progressive to be a halucination. If he was still dying on Omega, wouldn't he have died by now?

The idea occurred to Garrus that perhaps he might actually be dead and in some kind of afterlife. Perhaps the humans and hanar and whoever were right after all.

He dismissed the idea quickly. No. He could not be dead, this was not what being dead felt like, he was sure of it. He could not be insane. He hoped. No, there had been no… no moment of over-riding stress prior to seeing Shepard. No—immediate break-down. Not even with all he'd seen. No.

He'd learned to recognize shock and combat fatigue in other soldiers. Especially in his team on Omega. He would know if he was exhibiting either of those.

He might be dreaming, but he knew there were ways to tell whether or not this was true. A careful study of your environment revealed little holes in the dream that your brain couldn't properly patch up. With humans it was numbers. When a human thought they were dreaming, they could tell because they would look very hard at a list of numbers and their brain, unable to keep such vast sequences of information intact on the fly, would start dropping or shuffling numbers around, and so the illusion would break down.

With turians it was colour sequences. Complicated patterns would begin to look hazy or indistinct the longer you dwelled on them, Turian dreams were fast-paced and lively, blurred pastiches sights and sounds and scents, and tended not to allow for much idle contemplation. If you were contemplating in a dream it was not on the immediate scenery.

Garrus looked around. He was in a medical bay—not the Normandy's, and not any other one he recognized. He carefully scrutinized his surroundings as he lay on his bed. The ceiling. The ceiling was a smooth, indifferent polished metal surface. Hm. The computer screen, there. It displayed medical charts and things—complicated little bars and codes that would not react well to existence in the turian dreamscape.

He gazed at the monitor across the room, craning his neck around to see it better. He tried to ignore the faint, angry twinge in his neck that let him know that—against all impressions of sensation—there was still a pretty grievous wound down there.

He stared at the monitor. It remained stable. He gazed at the scatter chart and the little coded gene patterns on it. They remained resolutely unaffected.

Gene patterns?

He gazed at the computer screen.

"Doctor Chakwas..?" he said.

"Hmm?" The doctor looked up from where she had become occupied, studying some sheet of paper or another.

"What's that on the monitor?"

She looked at him, looked where she was looking. She frowned a little.

"Oh," she said, "that's just some… medical information."

"So it seems," said Garrus, "is it mine?"

Chakwas hesitated.

"Yes," she said, then: "Garrus."

She approached him, leaned towards him as he lay on the bed.

"You were very badly injured."

_What_?

"What?"

Garrus felt a wave of fresh unease.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Well, you lost quite a bit of tissue in the explosion."

Garrus reached up, brushed his face, gingerly. Against all odds, it seemed… remarkably intact, under the bandage. There was no scooped out caverns of missing flesh, no cut away bone.

"What do you mean," he said, "where'd I lose it?"

"Part of your face," she said, "was badly damaged."

"Well," said Garrus, slowly, "it can't be too bad… feels like everything's still there."

"You d—hm." he said, "whatever I lost, I think I can live with it."

"Well, that's not all," she said, "you actually lost quite a bit of muscle tissue and what was left was cut apart by the piece of shrapnel."

"Oh," said Garrus.

"I—" he said.

"Wait," he said, trying not to sound worried, "it… it went through my tongue, didn't it. How am I talking?"

"We had to correct some of the damage," said the doctor, "with cybernetics."

"Wh—" Garrus begain.

He gently felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue, which flexed with… alarming ease.

He prodded where the hole had been, and felt firm, unyielding skin. It was entirely possible that a turian's mandible could regrow if it was splinted properly and kept clean, but that wasn't the point. The hole in his mandible had quite simply been removed. The metal spike that had entered his face, he thought, would've left the bone splintered into dust. A spider-web of cracks would have spread through it, and it would have to have been stapled and splinted, making it a giant, ungainly mess of metal and bandages.

The explosion, he thought, he'd been so close, it would have to have melted the skin off the right side of his face. Would there have been anything left to splint..?

"Doctor," he said, "is this…" he raised a wavering hand to his right mandible, and touched it, gingerly.

"Is this mine?"

"Mostly," said Dr. Chakwas after a hesitant silence, "we took a small graft from the opposite side of your face and used it to culture a skin patch. Your mandible will be scarred, but mobile. We had to use a cybernetic patch to reconstruct some of the muscle though."

"Uh," said Garrus, distantly. He felt a little light-headed. "I see."

"Well, that's interesting," he added after a few moments, "I suppose this makes me… part machine," he trailed off.

"Nothing wrong with that," said Dr. Chakwas, "Commander Shepard has, well, has had some cybernetic surgery done since you saw her.

There were a few moments of silence.

"I have to get up," Garrus said.

"You most certainly do not," rejoined Chakwas, with tremendous vehemence.

"I have to see Shepard," he said, "she… It's been too long. If this is real, if I'm not dreaming—then I have to see her _right now._"

"Well," Dr. Chakwas said—she frowned—"I suppose I can't stop you, can I. Be careful, though, Garrus Vakarian."

"Yes," he said, sitting up slowly and gingerly.

"Don't put any weight on your arm."

"No weight," said Garrus.

"And don't try to flex any part of your face. No… no smiling, no frowning. Don't open your mouth wide or you'll tear something, and we'll have to start work all over again with a new patch."

"Don't flex, got it," he replied, vaguely, swinging his legs off the table.

"Garrus," said Chakwas, putting a hand on his shoulder. The sudden concern in her voice startled him. He looked over at her.

"It's been a while," she said, "Shepard won't… there will be some… changes."

"I suppose so," said Garrus, "out in the middle of space, doing whatever she was doing. Months and months of covert ops… Missions like that change anybody, Shepard's no exception."

"No, there won't be changes with her," Chakwas said, "Shepard hasn't changed a bit. You have. You might not like it."

Garrus looked at her, hard.

"What—" he said.

"Just," said the doctor, sadly, "just be prepared."

Garrus got off his bed, slowly, silently. He turned her words over in his head, paying little attention to the environment around him.

He got half-way through the room in quiet thought before turning around.

He felt he ought to say something, but words were in short supply.

"Don't worry," added the Doctor, in a tone which did nothing to allieviate any worry, "just try not to be surprised."

"Well," said Garrus, evenly, "alright. Thank you, Doctor. For everything."

She nodded. He turned and left.

Garrus proceeded through the… the Normandy, he supposed it was. It was a completely unfamiliar ship to him, it was bigger than the Normandy, newer than the Normandy. It had a different floorplan, and different equipment, different rooms and different markings on the wall. _Cerberus_ but, in some ways, it was very much like the normandy. He found himself absent-mindedly treading the same path to the stairs that he always used to on the Normandy, before… before everything changed. He found an elevator in its place, and, after a little trouble figuring out where it went, he managed to ascend to the floor directly above, and through that to the conference room.

He heard voices as he approached.

"…I know the docs corrected what they could—surgical procedures; cybernetics, that sort of thing—but he took a bad hit. I wouldn't get my—"

The door slid open. Hiss, click. Garrus saw a table in a long room, with two people stood in front of him, on either side of it.

To the left was a dark-skinned human Garrus didn't recognize, to the right…

"Shepard," said Garrus.

"Tough son of a bitch," breathed the dark-skinned man, "didn't think he'd be up yet."

Garrus was aware of his voice in the corner of his mind, but ignored it. He stared at Shepard, soaked her in. She stared at him back, grinning quietly. He felt all the old neurons in his head light up—felt a rush of happiness at seeing her face after… so long.

_You've changed, Garrus._

Had he?

He opened his mouth to speak. For a moment, he wondered what on earth he would say, but then the words filled his mouth, and they seemed absolutely perfect.

"No-one would give me a mirror," he said, "how bad is it?"

The corners of Shepards eyes crinkled up as the grin expanded. She took a deep, happy breath.

"Aw, hell," she began, "you were always ugly, Garrus; slap some face paint on there and no-one will even notice."

The shock of the words made him laugh in surprise. Garrus groaned and put a hand to his face. He hadn't thought much about Chakwas' words at the time but she was right, and there felt a very distinct possibility—in the strange, hollow tingling feeling, the alarm that his face sent him—that the entire right half of his face would come apart right there in his hand.

"Don't make me laugh, damnit," he cursed, still trying not to laugh, "my face is barely holding together as it is."

_You've changed, Garrus._

He stopped laughing, and looked at Shepard, regarding her quietly, wondering if it was true. He briefly recalled how cold he'd felt when he first met her. She didn't seem to remember, she was laughing now—without any noise. Her shoulders shook. The brown-skinned man looked back and forth between them, mildly happy that they were enjoying each other's company, but at a loss as to how to participate, and—perhaps—a little bit awed.

Garrus appreciated the man's silence. He, himself, would never dream of interupting the reminsciences of a pair of turian officers meeting for the first time; it would never do to interrupt two old friends, especially those whose bonds had been forged in combat, and it was good to see that this sort of respect crossed species.

Except… He and Shepard weren't that old a pair of friends. How many weeks had they known each other? Maybe months—two months? Had the whole mission with Saren only taken around two months? They'd become close friends then, but then… two years of silence. Shepard, drifting through space, doing whatever it was she did that she could not tell him, him… him, believing she was dead. Becoming bitter and angry and hateful and so sick of the galaxy. So sick of everything.

_You've changed, Garrus._

He sighed, picking up the slack in the conversation before it became uncomfortable or difficult to recover from.

"Some women find scars attractive," he mused, "mind you, most of those women are krogan."

Shepard snorted out loud and put a hand to her face. The other man, after a few more moments of standing there in the pair's presence, saluted.

Shepard briskly—if a little sloppily—returned the salute, and the man left.

Shepard moved a few paces closer, bringing them from the shared cameraderie of old fighting buddies, to the closer personal space of friends.

"So," she said, "how are you, really? You…" she sighed, and gazed away for a moment, past Garrus, at a corner of the room.

"You didn't look good," she said, "not really. We weren't sure you'd make it."

"I'm fine," Garrus said, waving his good hand, gently, "Dr. Chakwas is the best doctor I know, in space or planet-side, and if she can't fix me up, then, well, maybe I don't want to be in combat any more. It's nice to see her on this ship."

She nodded, distantly, a smile on her face.

"It's good to see her—Joker too," she added, "he's the pilot."

"_Really," _said Garrus, genuinely interested for a moment, "that tireless reprobate's been piloting the Normandy?"

"Since it's—since _this _one's maiden voyage," Shepard said, correcting herself.

"Well, that helps me feel better about this," Garrus mused, only half-heartedly though, as another thought began to steal back upon his mind.

"It's how I sleep at night," Shepard said, solemnly. Garrus snorted.

He paused. He looked around the conference room. Something which had been bothering him since he woke up finally surfaced to be vocalized.

"Frankly, I'm more worried about you."

Shepard raised her eyebrows, a human reflex he'd learned meant surprise or interrogation. It was easily faked, and he looked at her narrowly, trying to gauge how genuinely she did not understand him. There was a tense silence.

"Cerberus, Shepard," he said, a little louder. Her face slackened again, she understood his point now. Still…

Garrus felt his throat tighten.

"You remember those sick experiments they were doing," he said.

Shepard shifted on her feet, shot him her Honest Jane look.

"That's why I'm glad you're here," she said, quietly. "I'm walking into hell, I want someone I can trust on my side."

"Hm," said Garrus. Her answer was an appropriate one. She was not… she wasn't blind, at least. She admitted that she wasn't keeping the best company, and that was good enough for now.

"You realize," said Garrus, "this has me walking into hell with you."

"Hah," he snorted, dryly, after a further pause, "just like old times."

There was another silence, made elastic and comfortable again by the equilibrium restored between them. Shepard appeared to be thinking about something.

"I'm fit for duty, Shepard," Garrus said, as the silence coasted to its end, "I'll settle in and see what I can do at the forward batteries."

They exchanged nods.

He took a few steps backward, turned, left.

"Garrus," he heard her call after him. He turned back, Shepard stepped out into the hall behind him.

"You know," she said, "they can hear me. They have the whole place bugged."

Garrus stared at her quietly. He nodded, he turned and left.

He strode aimlessly around the deck he was on, until he discovered that he was on the wrong deck for the forward guns. He felt mildly bewildered. The new ship was very clearly supposed to be the normandy. There was normandy stencilling everywhere, there was normandy in the computer controls, normandy on the walls. Normandy SR-2.

Cerberus.

It was not the original normandy, it was Cerberus' normandy. Cerberus on the walls, cerberus on the computer controls, cerberus stencilling everywhere.

After a brief but mildly frustrating excursion into the service level, as the result of his over-estimating the distance down to the forward battery, he finally made his way through the ship—through the crew quarters, for that matter—to the gun controls.

Finally.

He stepped into the quiet, red-lit room, leaving all the people behind him. There were quite a few people. Human people. Hm.

Hmmm.

Cerberus, the anarchistic, raging, almost totally unhinged pro-human terrorist group intent on turning the human race into the supreme member of the alliance—perhaps on supplanting the alliance entirely. They did not seem, in spite of all their propaganda and cautiously worded public statements, to herald a new dawning era of enlightenment and mutual prosperity. He'd seen things done on distant planets, done by cerberus in the name of humanity, that should not be done to anyone, or anything.

It was done, of course, constantly—not just by humans, by every race. It was done by criminals, pirates and psychopaths, unethical researchers, cults, murderers. Basically, it was done by the people he'd sworn to put behind bars, and had spent a considerable portion of his career-oriented life trying to do. Later on, he'd stopped worrying about the bars, and started trying to put them in coffins. That, he sometimes thought, might not be the best way to solve the problem, but it was the only one he could see, near the end, and the only one that consistently worked.

The point was he was against it, and now here was Shepard, in the middle of these people, doing their missions, wearing their armour and eating their meals.

It upset him.

He knew what she was trying to tell him, of course, when she told him that they were listening to her. She meant that they didn't trust her, and that they knew she didn't trust them. She was trying to tell him that she was more aware of what was going on than she'd said, and that he didn't need to worry, but…

but…

but nothing, really. He sighed, and walked up to the gun controls. She'd always known what to do. She'd always known how to move the situation the right way, how to move people the right way.

She was a lot more devious than anyone would give her credit for, to be honest.

He breathed a brief laugh. So many times she seemed so incredibly naive and uneducated about the state of the universe. Sticking to weird old ideologies, and sometimes seeming to choose almost deliberately difficult paths, just for the sake of principle, but then, after all the idealistic monologuing and all the appeals to the natural goodness of people in the face of all evidence, sometimes, sometimes…

Sometimes Garrus would see her smile, in a way that didn't seem quite honest to him. A little grin would crumpled up the corners of her mouth at an inappropriate time, her eyes would squeeze up in delight at a private joke, and he would wonder just how hard she thought about the words she spoke, and just how much thought she put into words that seemed on the surface so blithe and ingenuous. She'd had the galaxy wrapped around her little finger—to coin the term—and Garrus was sure she knew it, every inch.

For all that, he had never doubted her, and now that he thought about it now, it'd never even occurred to him that he might be one of the people under her strange spell. She'd always been honest with him, he'd felt. Always…

She was always taking him on missions, always wanting his opinion on everything. It wasn't that he wasn't capable of rising to the occasion, of course; most of her dependence on him was on account of their time in the field, and, he hoped, her respect for his tactical experience.

He hoped. It would have been a tremendous blow to his ego if she didn't actually respect him in combat, but she seemed to weigh his opinions. She would argue with him, listen to him, nod, shake her head. She would act on his advice, and he would act on hers. It had always seemed like a strong bond between soldiers, who trusted each other.

But then she left.

And now…

He had to trust her. He _wanted_ to trust her. He had trusted her back then, and he had to trust her now, didn't he…?

Chakwas had said that Shepard was the same person, and, well, who knew, Chakwas could very easily be on the payroll of Cerberus in more ways than one, but something about what she said stuck with him.

"She hasn't changed," Chakwas had said, "You have. You might not like it."

She did seem very much the same. Same old Shepard, even under the new scars and new armour…

…Chakwas was right though, Garrus realized, he didn't like it. To tell the truth, he still wasn't entirely sure what either of them were doing in this end of space. Shepard with Cerberus, and he with Shepard.

It was, he reflected, less than a day ago he'd been waiting to die in an empty shell of a building, an empty shell of a man. All the people he'd killed, after Shepard had… had died. He didn't think he'd ever recover. He fell out of spectre training, he fell out of police work, he fell out of… of life. He'd ceased to be a good son, a good friend, a good turian, a… anything.

He'd been so heart-broken when she'd left him there in the citadel, when she went off to die above some frozen ball of junk in the end of space, destroyed by an unknown monster in an ignominious and lonely death.

There was a nervous chill with that memory. He felt a prickle on his neck.

He shuddered, and promptly began to busy himself with the gun's interface. He always felt it was best to recalibrate a gun when you took over its maintenance—it helped you know where you stood. Even if the previous engineer had done a five-star job, actually getting in there and completing the adjustments yourself helped you get a feel for the shape of the barrel, for the weft and the warp of it, the little electromagnetic snags, the imperfections.

A good gunnery officer was one who had taken apart his gun and put it back together at least twenty times, who knew it inside and out, and in the case of a flagship point cannon—where taking it apart would be ungainly and putting it back together again would be impossible outside of drydock—calibrating it was the next best thing.

He looked at the broad, desk-like interface.

A pair of Javelin torpedo pods, on the lower composite wings.

A Parrott front-point ezo slug accelerator, six meters long.

25 GARDIAN contact points, in a network of 9 discreet alignments.

4 Lamnius remote triple-barrelled cannons, for anti-personnel sweeps. Turian-made, he thought with a little pride.

Turian and human, just like the old Normandy. Not really, though. This one was made by Cerberus, and he was sure no Turians had actually been involved in the project. Still, the design testified to the skill of Turian engineers.

Had the old Normandy really been destroyed..? Was Shepard's cover, he assumed it had been her cover, really that important that she needed people to believe she'd been dead? The thought of the Normandy, that beautiful, sleek, broad, powerful ship—sitting on some planet at the end of space, burned out and irrecoverable, made him…

Angry. The nervous chill came back. She had to destroy the Normandy to keep her cover for… Cerberus?

He was confused. He didn't understand where she'd gone those two years in space, why she needed the world to believe she'd died—why she couldn't have trusted him, couldn't have said—

The nervousness turned into panic, and Garrus reacted, stomping down the rising torrent of emotions, like someone trying to put out a campfire that had gotten out of control. Oh, spirits, what was happening to him?

He blinked and fluttered his plates, and calmed himself down again. He did not have the… attention-span to cope with whatever it was that he was going through right now. He would deal with it later.

He brought up the interface for the Parrott and looked at the small table of obscure-looking romanic acronyms. HLM, TNL, TRM, HHG, CTI. English, of course. This was a human ship, after all. His eyepiece seamlessly translated for him into palaven equivalents, but he had long-since learned to recognize the foreign acronyms and numerals. He could calibrate a gun in almost any language.

He looked at the first table of data.

**TGM **it said, and then:

**0.004512, 0.002110, 0.000134 :: β -0.00021 return**

**0.004441, 0.002101, 0.000133**

**0.004470, 0.002001, 0.000500**

**WEFT WARP SHEAR PITCH YAW SIG ****ERROR BOSON**

**TEMP NOISE BUZZ ****DRIFT CAVITATE**

He frowned. At this point, he had no idea what any of that signified. He understood what it MEANT, of course. None of the errors were lit up, and the numbers looked good—but he really had no way of knowing what caused this unmitigated success. It could be a freak result, it could be a careful adjustment to cover for a grievous flaw in the gun's manufacture, it could just be because no-one had fired it in a long time.

He poked a button on the touch screen. A prompt appeared asking him if he wanted to begin a new calibration set.

He poked another button 'yes'. A table of new buttons cascaded across the screen.

This was it. This was what he knew how to do. Garrus suddenly felt warm and comfortable, and fell into the rote—brought through training and experience—as quickly as someone who had woken up from a nap might fall into the rote of walking.

He sank into a revery over the controls, letting his trained mind process and filter through the information presented to him as the rest of his mind—wearied by months of paranoia, responsibility, and ragged, on-edge military functionality—finally rested.

He stood in silence for quite some time, working carefully with the computer until he finished calibrating the Parrott, and saved the settings.

The terminal began to echo text to him as the script executed.

**EXEC -GLU c69023x GACANNON,0,0,1,4 (Parrott)**

**Compiling...**

He felt a satisfied smile tug at his face, but only briefly—it died on his mandibles, leaving a grim smirk, which began to fade away. He looked around, suddenly aware that he needed to sit down.

**Sorting bits**

**SIG INTERRUPT**

**SHUT DOWN**

His gaze settled on a crate. He stepped rigidly over to it, and sat down. He leaned back, slowly, gingerly, until his spine contacted the wall behind him. He relaxed, and sank back the rest of the way with a groan. His entire body hurt. Every last inch of it. Even his claws hurt. Dr. Chakwas was probably right, he thought. He shouldn't have gotten up, but…

**FLASHING GUN MASTER BOX. PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS.**

He felt _better_, for having done it. He wouldn't have been able to sleep in the medical bay, it wasn't… a good place to be. Not a problem with bay itself, obviously—the medical bay was fine, and a good soldier learned to sleep anywhere, wherever he could, but… Garrus knew that he had needed to see the ways this new ship was like and—and very unlike—the Normandy. He'd needed to get up, to touch reality, to know he wasn't insane. He needed to see Shepard.

He closed his eyes, and listen to the warm rush of the console fans, he felt the thrum of the engine in his feet. Just for a while, maybe, the Universe was okay.

**BOOT**

It was… very good to be back in a star ship, any starship, even if it wasn't the Normandy(and it wasn't, not really). It was good to make use of older skills, skills Garrus hadn't used in a while; to feel the learned, stately path of his hands across the console. The gun had been in immaculate condition, of course, but it felt great to make just that extra bit sure; to do it yourself.

**Writing Receipt ( )**

**RECEIPT MOVED TO MASTER**

**SENDING RECEIPT...**

It felt good to make use of a skill that didn't have grisly, gratuitous, intensely personal death attached to it. Garrus hadn't realized how grating and unnerving it felt to make use of his more violent skillset for an extended period of time.

A tremendous relief rested in his mind, and Garrus closed his eyes.

**Returning registry code.**

**Done!**

He heard the console chime, and smiled again.

**All tactical systems online.**

Garrus fell asleep.


	4. Am I the Same Girl?

"You know," Shepard said, "they can hear me. They have the whole place bugged."

Garrus looked at her, nodded curtly, and he was gone.

That was that. Shepard stepped forward, out of the door frame she'd been leaning against, her hand dropping down to her side. She idly drummed her fingers on her hip.

Shepard turned on her heel abruptly and headed for the elevator. She felt restless. She didn't know what it was.

She did not felt like writing a report, as she summoned the lift to take her to the next floor up—she had been anæsthetized and her left shoulder had been stitched up, leaving the arm senseless and stiff as a board—and the strangeness of the ship still agitated her. She needed to see the bridge again, to know that everything was still functioning and under control.

Maybe she did know what it was. The past week or so had been… odd, to say the least, and this latest occurrence had pitched the oddness up a couple degrees. She was not expecting this to happen. She was not prepared for this. She had not been prepared for any of this, her dying least of all.

She had been unprepared for many things in her lifetime. Being promoted to spectre, the attack on elysium, the prothean beacon, basic training, countless ambushes, sovereign, her first brawl, the attack on her ship, her orphaning.

Her orphaning. What had happened to her now was most like that. The other times she had been unprepared it had never mattered, she had buckled down, took what she had, and done her best, but… now…

The first days after she woke up had been most like it, there was a constant, harrowing sense of bewilderment and loneliness that could not be repelled or attacked; it could not be treated or quarantined. There was nothing to look at, nothing to figure out. There was just the hard, crimped knuckle of panic and grief twisting your guts around as you struggled to make sense of the turn your life had just taken.

It had not been that bad this time, mostly because she was still not entirely sure she had come to terms with how her life had actually turned, and soon—very quickly, she met Chakwas and Joker again. There was corroboration and sympathy from people she knew and trusted, there was the confirmation that her crew were… alive, somewhere out in the galaxy. Probably. Mostly, anyway, and there was the constant presence of the reaper threat eating up her time and attention, so she had come to terms with her situation.

But the uneasy equilibrium she had reached with the universe—with the Other Normandy and the missing two years of her life—had been upset by this sudden addition to the crew. Garrus was back, everything had swivelled again, and Shepard needed to talk to someone. She needed to seek solace with a familiar face.

So it was that, approaching what could feasibly be considered Lunch-Time in the timeless space aboard the Normandy, Shepard could be found, stealing quietly into the cockpit of the craft, and sitting down a small distance aft of the pilot, Jeff Moreau.

He was busy tucking something into his face. He was picking pieces off some oblong slab of meat—maybe fish—covered in some red, peppery-looking sauce and nested in a makeshift bowl made out of crumpled foil, and eating them with intense relish, barely chewing his current mouthful before taking a new bite.

She wasn't sure what it was he was eating; she hadn't felt like lunch yet. Maybe it was the aftereffects of the anaesthetic.

She hadn't said anything, but Joker had leaned forward in his seat as she arrived, licking his fingers, craning his head around one side and then the other of the backrest to see who it was.

"Oh, Commander," he said and relaxed back into the cupped shape of the backrest. His thumb fiddled with a control on the arm rest and the chair turned slowly around to face where Shepard stood.

"How're we doing, Joker?" She said, her mouth saying the words as a matter of habit than out of any real interest.

Joker looked at her.

"Oh, we're doing fine, Captain," he said, blandly, "what with Archangel turning out to be Garrus and all; Grunt having to truck his Turian ass all the way up here minus a couple buckets of his own blood, you fainting in front of half the crew."

"I mean," he went on, "are _you_ doing okay? Cause, I gotta tell you, I feel a little jumpy."

Shepard sat there for a few seconds, blankly, while her mind attempted to formulate a reply. She had come seeking solace in a familiar face. She had not come prepared to actually say anything meaningful.

"I'm doing well enough," she said, after some pause.

"It was a shock, though," she added, ineffectually, "and I could use some sleep."

"Passing out on the floor didn't cover you, huh?" Joker said, his face immobile.

"Yeah, well," Shepard said, feeling a tired smile pull at her cheeks, "passing out isn't as restful as you'd think."

"No shit," mused Joker, as his seat slowly began to drift back around, orienting itself towards the fore windows of the cockpit.

"I'm sure you have some experience with that," Shepard said, after a few seconds.

"Oh," Joker said, then: "Oh. Aha ha ha. Is this because of my charmingly lackadaisical attitude towards regulation? I like a drink every once in a while, but I'm not _allowed_ to get fall-down drunk, Commander. It messes with my calcium levels."

Shepard blinked, uncertainly, and her momentary smile faded again.

"What? You mean you've never gotten drunk before?"

"That's kind of a weird thing to be judging me for," said Joker, though without much malice, "seeing as you're CO and all."

"Hah," Shepard said, more out of acknowledgement that Joker had made a joke, than out of any amusement. Her mind was still focused elsewhere.

"No, I've never been drunk," Joker went on, "at least not enough to count. One of the reasons I got so much done in flight school: no distractions. The little crippled kid couldn't go out and party with the cool guys, so he stayed in his room like a good little crippled kid and studied his brains out."

Shepard leaned back slowly in her chair.

"Huh," she said, "I never would've known that…"

"Sorry if I touched a nerve," she added, after a brief silence.

"Ah, nah," Joker shrugged in his seat, "it's nothing. I'm probably better off anyway, according to, you know," he said, "…science. Oh and let me tell you," he added, "I've seen a LOT of hangovers, and they're way uglier when you're seeing them from fifteen feet away and sober."

There was a period of pensive thought, after which Shepard rejoined:

"Yeah, well, they don't look so great when you're up close and still drunk. It's hard to keep your own hair out of the toilet when you can't find the back of your head with both hands."

It was to her surprise as much as his.

Joker snorted, a genuine laugh.

"Wow, Commander." Joker shook his head. They laughed awkwardly, in the silence of the cockpit.

Shepard rubbed her face with one hand and sighed.

"You are a reeeeeal class act," Joker enunciated carefully, after a few seconds had elapsed.

"Post-Basic Training," said Shepard, by way of apology, "some of us wanted to celebrate that we'd made it. We might've got a little over-excited."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

"At least I got back on base. A couple didn't, and most of the rest were brought up on disorderly charges. I wasn't used to drinking, though—so I headed back early. I actually made muster, except I was sick to my stomach and sweating like a pig. The drill sergeant was busy yelling at all of us about shameful conduct the night before, and being a disgrace to the unit, but hell, I was just trying not to throw up all over my shoes."

"Wait," Joker turned his seat around again, "so you weren't caught?"

"Oh, no. I was caught," Shepard said, drily. "After I got back from my ten days leave I got a month of confinement."

"Hah," Joker said, "and now you're humanity's finest, huh?"

"Yeah," said Shepard, passing a hand over her face again. "You know, I've never actually told anyone this before."

"Well, I mean, you'd want to hold onto a gem like that," said Joker, "keep that retell value up."

Shepard laughed.

"Yes, I suppose so…" she said.

She wondered if there was something she should've been doing.

Miranda would be happy enough to write the report in Shepard's absence. There was nothing to tell that was especially unusual: found missing ex-cop friend on galactic crime homeworld, destroyed three entire mercenary fire teams.

She laughed to herself, a single, dry chuckle; It was an odd time you were living in when none of those events could be considered close to noteworthy.

"What's so funny, Commander?" Joker asked.

"Just… Life," Shepard said, "where we are now." She waved a hand helplessly at the ship around her.

"Two weeks ago, I remember we were flying past some… some planet at the edge of civilized space. Then the Normandy was destroyed, then… Two weeks later, I wake up, and it's two years later, and here we are again. You, me."

"Garrus," said, Joker, nodding his head pensively along to her monologue.

"Not Tali, though," said Shepard, "or Kaiden."

She took a deep breath, and let it out again. It came out shakier than she'd expected it to.

"Not Wrex, or Liara," she said. "Two weeks later, and the whole world has changed."

"I'm sorry I left you behind," she said.

"Well—I mean. Shit, commander," said Joker, an expression of mild discomfort haunting the edges of his face, "it's not your fault you died."

"Still," she said, "I guess… I'm sorry you left _me_ behind, then," she laughed, "I feel like I could've been a lot better prepared to lead you if I'd been able to see some of the same things you have. To feel the state of the galaxy. I don't want to... let anyone down, here."

"Well," Joker said, and then:

"I mean, not much as actually changed, when you think about it," he went on. "The alliance are still assholes. You know. People are still acting like the reapers don't exist."

Shepard sat up.

"Still, huh?" she said, half to herself.

"Yeah. The most popular argument is uh, 'no corroborating evidence,'" Joker said, adding the obligatory air-quotes with a grimace. "By the time the pieces of Sovereign hit Citadel, they were basically metal toothpicks, and after you, you know… went, the council just kinda writ you off as a… as a crank, you know? You weren't around to speak up for yourself anymore, so they just kinda acted like… like you went kinda batshit crazy out there in space. No-one else really saw what you did on Eden Prime, and almost no-one was around for Virmire, so…"

He trailed off, uncomfortably.

"No kidding," said Shepard. She frowned. She'd always had to fight with the council to keep her viewpoint alive and discussed. She didn't know what it was: if it was speciesism, classism, fear that she was right, a simple desire to maintain the status quo, what.

She stared at the space debris drifting past.

"We're going to have to go back to the Citadel," she said, aloud.

"Now, Commander?" said Joker, half-leaning back towards the Normandy's pilot console in the simple anticipation of the order.

"…No," Shepard said, shaking her head faintly, "not yet."

"'Cause I was just taking us to the fuel depot. We kinda spent our last tank flying around the Eagle Nebula. We have enough to make it to the mass relay though."

"It's alright," Shepard said, "I don't want to go back just yet… I don't know what I'd say, for one thing," she added.

"Well the council's been walking all over you ever since you, disappeared," said Joker, and did she hear a hint of hesitation before that last word? He went on, however, unfazed, "so I mean to start off with, you could say hi with a nice, big, 'fu—'"

"Shepard," intoned a voice right behind Shepard's ear. She resisted the urge to jump.

"Yes EDI?" Shepard replied. She looked around. There, by the door, was the little holographic blue sphere that represented the full capacity and undivided attention of the ship's artificial intelligence. It was projected from some holographic node embedded, unseen, near the doorway. There was one in every room and most of the hallways.

"The Illusive Man would like to speak to you in the Comm centre, regarding the outcome of your last mission," said the sphere. The little waveband visualizer on the front of the sphere pulsed in synchronization with AI's voice, but beside that remained it remained motionless.

Shepard frowned.

"Didn't Miranda send a report?" Shepard asked, without any particular enthusiasm to hear the answer.

"Her report failed to include all the information the Illusive Man requires to declare the mission a success."

Shepard sighed. He knew Archangel was Garrus. This was a check-up; not on the mission, on her.

"Alright," she said aloud, allowing only the slightest trace of weariness into her voice. "Thanks EDI."

"Yes, Commander," said the sphere, and winked out of existence.

Shepard sank back into her chair, and closed her eyes.

She could feel the bead of Joker's gaze in the silence that followed. She lay, motionless, leaning back against the headrest.

Joker spoke.

"You gonna go see him?"

"In a bit," Shepard said.

"Right. Well, enjoy yourself."

She heard the microscopic whine of the motor in the base of his chair as it turned around, unseen, outside her vision, then:

"Commander?"

"Yes, Joker?" she said, eyes still closed.

"You're not gonna let anyone down."

"…Thank you, Joker."

She felt her breath begin to slow down as her body began to relax. She didn't get to relax often, she reflected. At least, not in the past couple of weeks. She'd constantly felt like she was wound tighter than a drum.

No surprise, really.

She wondered if there was some way of inducing relaxation. She had never had much interest in... yoga—or being massaged. Maybe it was simply because she'd never been in any proximity to these things when she was young. The idea was incredibly foreign to her now, and seemed silly and embarrassing to do. Stretching slowly into arbitrary positions with twee, pseudo-mystical sounding names. Lying down half-naked, being prodded by strangers for hours at a time.

She sighed. Maybe she should try it anyway.

Her body was not really fit for duty, was what the other half of the problem was. Miranda said it was fit for duty. Miranda blustered and strutted and used phrases like 'therapeutic myostimulation' and 'carefully monitored steroid regime', and was hotly insistent that Shepard's body was as good as it always had been.

But it wasn't. Shepard could feel her body was slower than it used to be. Her reflexes were hampered, blurred at the edges by clouding forces she couldn't quite get come to grips with. Her muscles might have been the size they used to be, but they weren't hardened against the rigours of combat any more. Every ground mission she'd come back from had left her feeling as if she'd been attacked with a couple of hammers for an hour. The pains followed her every movement. The hardened, constricting ache went down into her joints and would not go away.

Shepard remembered the feeling, of course: basic training—when you were broken down and rebuilt into a new human being. Ready for combat.

A new human being.

She counted that this feeling would go away eventually. She'd get used to her own skin again; her nerves would recall the actions she'd trained them to; her spine would remember all the old reflexes.

Ready for combat.

They weren't all her nerves any more. There were wires in some places, bits of synthetic tissue. Would they ever ever learn the actions? Would they ever feel like part of her?

Broken down and rebuilt.

Garrus was back. That was good. For... for the past week and a half—during all the whirl and action, and the palaver and pomp of Shepard coming back to the galaxy, she'd been wondering what had happened to him. She'd wondered how he was doing. It wasn't all the time—she'd metered out her time for reflection into relatively small periods when absolutely nothing else was occupying her attention, but when the silence came back, so too did the emotion, the wondering, the worry.

That was what was happening now. It wasn't pleasant, but she let it happen anyway. It had to happen some time.

Garrus, Tali, Kaiden, Wrex, Liara. She had blinked out of consciousness for what seemed like two hours, and woke up to find it had been twenty-thousand. Her crew had been scattered to the stars and she had no certain hope of ever seeing them again.

Kaiden was somewhere she couldn't reach him. Tali had been happy to see her, but left almost immediately with the ill Quarian. Veetor was his name, she remembered after a few moments.

Joker's presence was comforting—she trusted him with her life—but he was prickly and self-consciously closed-lipped about most serious subjects, and his inability to vacate the ship—when she herself was so actively embarking on missions with her crew—made their relationship an even more distant one.

Dr. Chakwas was incredibly welcome. Good old Dr. Chakwas. It felt strange to refer to her by her first name, or really anything other than Doctor.

And now Garrus was back, but while seeing him safe and sound—as much as he was—was an incredible relief, Shepard could not help but feel there was something wrong. Not just different, she might've been okay with different, but there was something…

Something wrong. Something missing. Something in his eyes…

It was just an illusion, probably, Shepard thought to herself. Turian faces were not like human faces, and did not express nearly as much through their eyes as human faces did, but… What was it?

Something in his voice? His posture?

She wasn't sure. He'd disappeared almost as soon as he said hello to her. That wasn't usual. They could've talked for a solid hour a day, back in the day, with no pauses. Longer, if there wasn't a mission to embark on.

She felt her head loll sideways, rolling across the headrest, and she let it. She was incredibly tired, and the less effort she had to exert to keep herself upright, the better she felt.

Maybe Garrus was still just feeling the effects of nearly having his head blown off.

She smiled to herself, the dryness of the comment deflecting some of the horror she had lived through some twelve hours earlier.

Maybe things would even out in a couple days. He was safe now, and that was what mattered.

That… was… all… that…

And, very quietly, Shepard finally fell asleep.

* * *

_'We're losing her!'_

Once Shepard realized she was regaining consciousness, she began to storm rush it, grabbing for control of her body and forcing herself awake. She took deep, gasping breaths, fighting the leaden feeling of tiredness in her lungs and consciously working to keep her eyelids wide open.

'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!" she heard a voice yelling from outside the black, inky bubble of her own panic. She thought she recognized it, but she didn't care. She leapt up anyway—she couldn't give in now—she pushed frantically against the blackness, treading water in her own spasming body to keep herself—

...

to keep herself in the interior of the cockpit.

_Oh._

Her breath still racing, she stood, arms held out from her sides in an open crouch of defence, hair stuck to her cheeks and nose—her forehead was beaded with newly condensed sweat.

She stared forward, at the wide-eyed, stunned expression on the face of Jeff Moreau. His hands were held up in a urgently pacifying gesture.

"Calm down, commander, it's just a dream!"

Shepard sat down heavily, and immediately regretted it, as the warning feeling of Injury rippled through her side. She gingerly reached down and prodded the gunshot wound. She winced, and looked at her fingers, which were streaked with pink from where the wound had begun to leak again.

That was going to leave a mark.

"Sorry," she said, slumping down in the seat. She haphazardly searched for somewhere to wipe the bloody fluid off her fingers, before settling for her pant leg.

"You okay?" asked Jeff. Joker. His still-raised hands now slowly dropping down to his sides.

"No worse off than I was already," Shepard mumbled. She wiped the sweat off her forehead, peeling a few of the tangles of hair away from her eyes. Her hand slid down her face, and she felt the deep criss-cross of the scar on her cheek.

"Must've been some dream," Joker probed, cautiously.

Shepard fought to control her reflex, which was to tell him to mind his own damn business. She felt panicked and a little sick still, and in no mood to deal with being questioned about something she didn't yet understand herself.

It wasn't his fault. He was concerned, anyway.

"It was just a dream," she said, trying very hard to sound like she believed it, "don't worry, I'll be fine."

"…Uhuh," said Joker—not sarcastically, but she could tell his heart wasn't in it. He looked abstractly at a nearby console and prodded a holographic box with his finger. The console display flickered and changed, and he gazed at it without appearing to take in any of the information being presented.

"Maybe you should talk to the doc about that," he said, as his chair began to rotate away from her, back to the fore of the Normandy.

Shepard said nothing and stood up slowly, holding her side to mitigate the objection her body was raising to the movement. The debrided flesh around the outside of the gunshot wound twinged sharply, in spite of the painkillers.

She knew she was supposed to report to the Illusive man, but she was exhausted. She did not want to tell him how she felt. It rankled with her that he only wanted to talk to her so that he could poke at her psyche until she gave up enough of herself that he was satisfied she wouldn't fall apart.

"I'll be seeing you," she said.

"Yes _ma'am_," said the Joker, flatly.

"EDI, get the conference room ready. I'll be with the illusive man in a moment."

"Yes, Commander."

Shepard strode out of the cockpit, through the CIC, and down the corridor to the elevator. As she passed, a woman saluted her—Yeoman Chambers. Shepard returned the salute, but only barely. She did not _like_ Yeoman Chambers, and in the crewman's manicured, flighty little hands, a salute felt like a mockery at the best of times.

She entered the elevator and directed the lift upwards, to her cabin in the loft of the ship.

She scowled.

It was the price the Illusive Man expected her to pay for her revival—this little check-up he was appointing—a piece of her. At great personal expense, he had brought Shepard back to life. He was an investor, with a controlling interest, and he wanted to make sure his investment wasn't going to go bad.

The lift door opened. She walked through the lift door into a small atrium, and through the door after that into her cabin. The room extended around her, alien and weird.

She stopped short for a moment, and then sighed. In her current, distracted state of mind, it had managed to surprised her again.

She was getting used to it, but of all the places on the Normandy SR-2 that did not feel like home, the Captain's Cabin was the most poignantly so.

Shepard's face felt crusty and unpleasant after the trip to Omega and she had taken very little effort to clean, up to this point. Her swear-drenched nightmare had left her even more disheveled, so before she went down to meet her overseer, she decided to wash her face.

As she did so—bringing the water up in cupped hands and scrubbing hastily—she took care not to press too hard against the hairline fissures in her face, where the cybernetic patches in her nervous system, the synthetic contractile tissue, the nano-strings and blood meshes, kept together the parts of her face that, logically, never should've functioned ever again.

She looked at her face in the mirror. A faint orange glow shone through where her skin was the thinnest above the cybernetics—A glimmering little knot of what she could only assume was some kind of fibre optic.

She took some soap, and worked up a thin lather, which she spread ineffectively around her cheeks and forehead.

She was told she didn't need to worry about whether or not water got in the scars, her flesh had healed underneath and above, and the cybernetics were water-proof—they would have to be—and she was just waiting for it to slowly close over, but…

Theoretically her face should've healed before she was woken up on the Lazarus station, but extenuating circumstances had prevented this; the doctor who had been responsible for so much of her rehabilitation had decided to kill her.

She rinsed. Water dripped from her chin and eyebrows, and gathered on her lips, where she blew it away hastily.

That knowledge still left her uneasy; the change of heart had been… confusing to assess, in hindsight. No-one had ever gotten to ask Wilson what made him decide she must die. Of course, in a group like Cerberus, any staff was a risk, a crapshoot. It was an organization that thrived on secrets, bottomless slush funds and raging xenophobia; it was bound to attract odd people.

Still.

Shepard took another look at her face in the mirror. As a thin, frown tugged at her mouth, the little knot of fibre-optic voodoo under her skin flared up a little and shifted, like an ember on a scrap of paper.

She breathed a careful sigh and rested her hand on her middle.

It had been a calming reflex once, a subconscious little tick that fell into her repertoire of subconscious little ticks—everyone had them—designed to settle and soothe, but now when she pressed her hand to her diaphragm, Shepard could feel her pulse under her fingers, and the fluttery little rhythm brought instantly to mind how much life could leave her body before she was officially declared dead. It brought to mind how many minutes her heart could suffer atrial fibrillation before it started to curdle the blood going through her arteries. How many neurones in her brain could fail to fire before her mind looked blank to a pattern scanner.

She whisked her hand down to her side.

She breathed another deliberate breath, let the sigh out. She stepped to the door of her cabin, through to the elevator, and went went downstairs.


End file.
